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General von Boehn, commanding the Ninth German Army, 
and Mr. Powell. 



FIGHTING 

IN FLANDERS 



BY 

E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S. 

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE NEW YORK WORLD 
WITH THE BELGIAN FORCES IN THE FIELD 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1914 • 



3i 



S4\ 



Copyright, 1914, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published December, 1914 




DEC 16 1914 

©GLA;i87983 



TO 

MY FRIENDS 

THE BELGIANS 



'/ have eaten your bread and salt, 
I have drunk your water and wine; 
The deaths ye died I have watched beside 
And the lives that ye led were mine." 



FOREWORD 

NOTHING is more unwise, on general 
principles, than to attempt to write 
about a war before that war is 
finished and before history has given it the 
justice of perspective. The campaign which 
began with the flight of the Belgian Government 
from Brussels and which culminated in the fall 
of Antwerp formed, however, a separate and 
distinct phase of the Greatest of Wars, and I 
feel that I should write of that campaign while 
its events are still sharp and clear in my 
memory and before the impressions it produced 
have begun to fade. I hope that those in 
search of a detailed or technical account of 
the campaign in Flanders will not read this 
book, because they are certain to be disap- 
pointed. It contains nothing about strategy 
or tactics and few military lessons can be drawn 
from it. It is merely the story, in simple 
words, of what I, a professional onlooker, who 

vii 



viii FOREWORD 

was accorded rather exceptional facilities for 
observation, saw in Belgium during that na- 
tion's hour of trial. 

An American, I went to Belgium at the 
beginning of the war with an open mind. I 
had few, if any, prejudices. I knew the En- 
glish, the French, the Belgians, the Germans 
equally well. I had friends in all four countries 
and many happy recollections of days I had 
spent in each. When I left Antwerp after the 
German occupation I was as pro-Belgian as 
though I had been born under the red-black- 
and-yellow banner. I had seen a country, 
one of the loveliest and most peaceable in 
Europe, invaded by a ruthless and brutal 
soldiery; I had seen its towns and cities 
blackened by fire and broken by shell; I had 
seen its churches and its historic monuments 
destroyed; I had seen its highways crowded 
with hunted, homeless fugitives; I had seen 
its fertile fields strewn with the corpses of what 
had once been the manhood of the nation; 
I had seen its women left husbandless and its 
children left fatherless; I had seen what was 
once a Garden of the Lord turned into a land 
of desolation; and I had seen its people — a 



FOREWORD IX 

people whom I, like the rest of the world, 
had always thought of as pleasure-loving, in- 
efficient, easy-going — I had seen this people, I 
say, aroused, resourceful, unafraid, and fight- 
ing, fighting, fighting. Do you wonder that 
they captured my imagination, that they won 
my admiration ? I am pro-Belgian; I admit 
it frankly. I should be ashamed to be any- 
thing else. 

E. ALEXANDER POWELL. 

London, November i, 1914. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

FOREWORD vii 

CHAPTER 

I. THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS i 

II. THE CITY OF GLOOM 27 

III. THE DEATH IN THE AIR 51 

IV. UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 76 
V. WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 104 

VI. ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 132 

VII. THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 170 

VIII. THE FALL OF ANTWERP 199 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

General von Boehn, commanding the Ninth German Army, 

and Mr. Powell Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

Mr. Joseph Medill Patterson, editor of the Chicago Tribune^ 
and his cinematograph operator, Mr. Edwin Weigle, 
taking "movies" at the battle of Waelhem .... 2 

In the wake of the Uhlans. A Belgian village in flames . 8 

Mr. Powell (at right) and his photographer, Donald C. 

Thompson 14 

Antwerp was encircled by acres upon acres of barbed-wire 

entanglements 30 

A thirteen-year-old Boy Scout 38 

One of the bombs dropped during the Zeppelin raid on Ant- 
werp exploded in the ward of a hospital 54 

~~The effect of one of the bombs dropped from a Zeppelin on 

Antwerp 56 

The King of the Belgians (on the right) consulting with the 

Chief of Staff on the firing-line near Lierre .... 66 

Strauss, the Belgo-American driver of the auto-mitrailleuse 
in which the Prince de Ligue was killed during a raid 
into the German lines 70 

Belgian armored motor-car in action, firing across a dyke 

near Willebroeck 72 

Five thousand women waiting for bread in the courtyard of 

the Hotel de Ville at Malines 78 

A seventeen-year-old Belgian girl whose father, mother, 
brothers, and sister had been killed, and whose home 
had been destroyed 80 

Belgian peasant displaying the charred foot of a fifteen-year- 
old girl who was killed in the fighting at Melle ... 82 

xiii 



xiv ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

What the Germans did to Aerschot 84 

Mr. Powell (in tonneau of car) amid the ruins of Aerschot . 86 

.At Termonde, which the Germans destroyed in spite of the 
fact that the inhabitants had evacuated the city before 
their arrival 88 

The mother superior in front of the ruins of her convent at 

Termonde 90 

The Germans left nearly half of Louvain in ashes ... 92 

In comparison to its size, the Germans wrought more wide- 
spread destruction in Louvain than did the earthquake 
and fire combined in San Francisco 94 

The words, " Giite leute. Nicht zu pliin- 
dern" ("Good people. Do not 
plunder"), were scrawled on the door 
of this house in Louvain — . . . 



>■ Group ... 96 



— but there were no words on this house 

The Hotel de Ville in Termonde 98 

The ruins of the Hotel de Ville in Termonde 100 

The Belgian armored motor-car, driven by William van 

Calck of Pittsburg 106 

Mr. Powell and the two German soldiers whom he rescued 
from the mob in Ghent greeted by American refugees 
in Sotteghem no 

The German invasion of France 114 

"The dense masses of moving men in their elusive gray-green 
uniforms looked for all the world like a monstrous ser- 
pent crawling across the countryside" 1 16 

" Infantry in spiked and linen-covered helmets sweeping by, 
irresistibly as a mighty river, with their faces turned 
toward France" 1 18 

Bicyclists with carbines slung upon their backs, hunter 

fashion 120 

Field-gun of the German Imperial Guard 122 

Field-batteries of the Imperial Guard 124 



ILLUSTRATIONS xv 

FACING PAGE 

"Field kitchens rumbled down the lines, serving hot soup 

and coffee to the men" 126 

Mr. Powell as the guest of General von Boehn and the 

General Staff of the Ninth German Army 128 

On the road to Paris 130 

Steel bridge at Termonde dynamited by 

the Belgians ^ 

1 1 f Group . . . 132 
Another bridge at Termonde destroyed by 
, shell-fire 

ft 

The defence of Termonde 1 34 

The retaking of Termonde 136 

Mr. Powell and officers of the Guides, the crack cavalry of 

Belgium 138 

Belgian infantry going into action at the battle of Waelhem 142 

Belgian artillery in action at Lierre 146 

On the Belgian battle-line 148 

Wounded soldiers in the British field hospital in Antwerp . 152 

A chapel of the cathedral of Malines after the German 

bombardment ...,,.. 156 

The battle of Weerde 160 

Belgian field artillery in action at the battle of Weerde . . 162 

Belgian dog-battery waiting to go into action 164 

The defence of Antwerp , , . . . 170 

"In a wheelbarrow was sprawled the body of a little boy. 
He could not have been more than seven. We could 
see where the shell had hit him. Beside the dead boy 
sat his sister, a tot of three, with blood trickling from 
a flesh-wound in her face" 174 

One of the "wildcat" trains which the Belgians sent into 
the German lines outside of Antwerp, causing great 
damage 180 

Petrol tanks at Hoboken destroyed by the Belgians to pre- 
vent them falling into the hands of the Germans . . 184 



xvi ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

British marines and naval reservists in the trenches out- 
side of Antwerp i86 

The armored train in action near Boom i88 

The last stand 190 

Food for powder; a German killed at the battle of Alost . 192 

The retreat of the Belgian army from Antwerp .... 194 

The effect of German shells in Antwerp 200 

The bombardment of Antwerp; a six-story building des- 
troyed by a single 42-centimetre shell 202 

The bombardment of Antwerp 204 

How the despatches describing the fall of Antwerp came 

through 206 

A billet-doux from the Germans which a resident of Antwerp 

picked up in his garden 214 

The retreat from Antwerp. The Belgian 
army passing through Lokoren 

The rear-guard of the retreating Antwerp 
garrison 

As the result of fires which owed their origin to the bombard- 
ment, flames destroyed one entire side of the Marche 
aux Souliers 222 

The triumphal entry of the German army into Antwerp. 

Infantry passing down the Place de Meir 228 

The capture of Antwerp 230 



Group . . . 220 



FIGHTING 

IN FLANDERS 



I 

THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 

WAR correspondents regard war very 
much as a doctor regards sickness. 
I don't suppose that a doctor 
is actually glad that people are sick, but so 
long as sickness exists in the world he feels 
that he might as well get the benefit of it. 
It is the same with war correspondents. 
They do not wish any one to be killed on their 
account, but so long as men are going to be 
killed anyway, they want to be on hand to wit- 
ness the killing and, through the newspapers, 
to tell the world about it. The moment that 
the war "broke," therefore, a veritable army 
of British and American correspondents 
descended upon the Continent. Some of 
them were men of experience and discretion 
who had seen many wars and had a right to 
wear on their jackets more campaign ribbons 
than most generals. These men took the 
war seriously. They were there to get the 
news and, at no matter what expenditure of 
effort and money, to get that news to the end 



2 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

of a telegraph-wire so that the people in 
England and America might read it over their 
cofFee-cups the next morning. These men had 
unHmited funds at their disposal; they had 
the united influence of thousands of news- 
papers and of milHons of newspaper readers 
solidly behind them; and they carried in their 
pockets letters of introduction from editors 
and ex-presidents and ambassadors and prime 
ministers. 

Then there was an army corps of special 
writers, many of them with well-known 
names, sent out by various newspapers and 
magazines to write "mail stuff," as des- 
patches which are sent by mail instead of 
telegraph are termed, and ** human interest" 
stories. Their qualifications for reporting the 
greatest war in history consisted, for the most 
part, in having successfully ** covered" labor 
troubles and murder trials and coronations and 
presidential conventions, and, in a few cases, 
^Central American revolutions. Most of the 
stories which they sent home were written 
in comfortable hotel rooms in London or 
Paris or Rotterdam or Ostend. One of these 
correspondents, however, was not content with 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 3 

a hotel-window view-point. He wanted to 
see some German soldiers — preferably Uhlans. 
So he obtained a letter of introduction to some 
people living in the neighborhood of Courtrai, 
on the Franco-Belgian frontier. He made his 
way there with considerable difficulty and 
received a cordial welcome. The very first 
night that he was there a squadron of Uhlans 
galloped into the town, there was a slight 
skirmish, and they galloped out again. The 
correspondent, who was a sound sleeper, did 
not wake up until it was all over. Then he 
learned that the Uhlans had ridden under his 
very window. 

Crossing on the same steamer with me 
from New York was a well-known novelist who 
in his spare time edits a Chicago newspaper. 
He was provided with a sheaf of introductions 
from exalted personages and a bag contain- 
ing five thousand dollars in gold coin. It was 
so heavy that he had brought a man along 
to help him carry it, and at night they took 
turns in sitting up and guarding it. He 
confided to me that he had spent most of his 
life in trying to see wars, but though on four 
occasions he had travelled many thousands of 



4 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

miles to countries where wars were in progress, 
each time he had arrived just after the last 
shot was fired. He assured me very earnestly 
that he would go back to Michigan Boulevard 
quite contentedly if he could see just one 
battle. I am glad to say that his perseverance 
was finally rewarded and that he saw his battle. 
He never told me just how much of the five 
thousand dollars he took back to Chicago with 
him, but from some remarks he let drop I 
gathered that he had found battle hunting an 
expensive pastime. 

One of the great London dailies was repre- 
sented in Belgium by a young and slender and 
very beautiful English girl whose name, as a 
novelist and playwright, is known on both 
sides of the Atlantic. I met her in the 
American Consulate at Ghent, where she was 
pleading with Vice-Consul Van Hee to assist 
her in getting through the German lines 
to Brussels. She had heard a rumor that 
Brussels was shortly going to be burned or 
sacked or something of the sort, and she wanted 
to be on hand for the burning and sacking. 
She had arrived in Belgium wearing a London 
tailor's idea of what constituted a suitable 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 5 

costume for a war correspondent — perhaps I 
should say war correspondentess. Her luggage 
was a model of compactness: it consisted of a 
sleeping-bag, a note-book, half a dozen pencils 
— and a powder-pufF. She explained that she 
brought the sleeping-bag because she under- 
stood that war correspondents always slept in 
the field. As most of the fields in that part 
of Flanders were just then under several inches 
of water as a result of the autumn rains, a 
folding canoe would have been more useful. 
She was as insistent on being taken to see a 
battle as a child is on being taken to the cir- 
cus. Eventually her pleadings got the better 
of my judgment and I took her out in the car 
towards Alost to see, from a safe distance, what 
promised to be a small cavalry engagement. 
But the Belgian cavalry unexpectedly ran into 
a heavy force of Germans, and before we 
realized what was happening we were in a very 
warm corner indeed. Bullets were kicking 
up little spurts of dust about us; bullets were 
tang-tanging through the trees and clipping off 
twigs, which fell down upon our heads; the 
rat-tat-tat of the German musketry was 
answered by the angry snarl of the Belgian 



6 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

machine guns; in a field near by the bodies 
of two recently killed Cuirassiers lay sprawled 
grotesquely. The Belgian troopers were 
stretched flat upon the ground, a veteran 
English correspondent was giving a remarkable 
imitation of the bark on a tree, and my driver, 
my photographer, and I were peering cautiously 
from behind the corner of a brick farmhouse. 
I supposed that Miss War Correspondent was 
there too, but when I turned to speak to her 
she was gone. She was standing beside the 
car, which we had left in the middle of the 
road because the bullets were flying too thickly 
to turn it around, dabbing at her nose with a 
powder-puff" which she had left in the tonneau 
and then critically examining the eff'ect in a 
pocket mirror. 

"For the love of God!" said I, running out 
and dragging her back to shelter;, "don't you 
know that you'll be killed if you stay out 
here.?" 

"Will I?" said she sweetly. "Well, you 
surely don't expect me to be killed with my 
nose unpowdered, do you?" 

That evening I asked her for her impressions 
of her first battle. 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 7 

"Well," she answered, after a meditative 
pause, "it certainly was very chic J" 

The third and largest division of this jour- 
nalistic army consisted of free-lances who went 
to the Continent at their own expense on the 
chance of "stumbling into something." About 
the only thing that any of them stumbled into 
was trouble. Some of them bore the most 
extraordinary credentials ever carried by a 
correspondent; some of them had no creden- 
tials at all. One gentleman, who was halted 
while endeavoring to reach the firing-line in 
a decrepit cab, informed the officer before 
whom he was taken that he represented the 
Ladies^ Home Journal of Philadelphia. Another 
displayed a letter from the editor of a well- 
known magazine, saying that he "would be 
pleased to consider any articles which you care 
to submit." A third, upon being questioned, 
said naively that he represented his literary 
agent. Then — ^^I almost forgot him — there was 
a Methodist clergyman from Boston who ex- 
plained to the Provost Marshal that he was 
gathering material for a series of sermons on 
the horrors of war. Add to this army of 
writers another army of photographers and 



8 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

war artists and cinematograph operators and 
you will have some idea of the problem with 
which the miHtary authorities of the warring 
nations were confronted. It finally got down 
to the question of which should be permitted 
A to remain in the field — the war correspondents 
jor the soldiers. There wasn't room for them 
iboth. It was decided to retain the soldiers. 

The general staffs of the various armies 
handled the war-correspondent problem in 
different ways. The British War Office at 
first announced that under no considerations 
would any correspondents be permitted in the 
areas where British troops were operating, but 
such a howl went up from Press and public 
alike that this order was modified and it was 
announced that a limited number of correspon- 
dents, representing the great newspaper syndi- 
cates and press associations, would, after 
fulfilling certain rigorous requirements, be 
permitted to accompany his Majesty's forces 
in the field. These fortunate few having been 
chosen after much heartburning, they pro- 
ceeded to provide themselves with the pre- 
scribed uniforms and field kits, and some of 
them even purchased horses. After the war 










pq 






ID 
OS 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 9 

had been in progress for three months they 
were still in London. The French General 
Staff likewise announced that no correspon- 
dents would be permitted with the armies, 
and when any were caught they were uncere- 
moniously shipped to the nearest port, between 
two unsympathetic gendarmes, with a warning 
that they would be shot if they were caught 
again. The Belgian General Staff made no 
announcement at all. The police merely told 
those correspondents who succeeded in getting 
into the fortified position of Antwerp that 
their room was preferable to their company 
and informed them at what hour the next 
train for the Dutch frontier was leaving. Now 
the correspondents knew perfectly well that 
neither the British nor the French nor the 
Belgians would actually shoot them, if for no 
other reason than the unfavorable impression 
which would be produced by such a proceeding; 
but they did know that if they tried the patience 
of the military authorities too far they would 
spend the rest of the war in a military prison. 
So, as an imprisoned correspondent is as 
valueless to the newspaper which employs him 
as a prisoner of war is to the nation whose 



lo FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

uniform he wears, they compromised by picking 
up such information as they could along the 
edge of things. Which accounts for most of 
the despatches being dated from Ostend or 
Ghent or Dunkirk or Boulogne or from "the 
back of the front/* as one correspondent inge- 
niously put it. As for the Germans, they said 
bluntly that any correspondents found within 
their lines would be treated as spies — ^which 
meant being blindfolded and placed between 
a stone wall and a firing-party. And every 
correspondent knew that they would do exactly 
what they said. They have no proper respect 
for the Press, these Germans. 

That I was officially recognized by the 
Belgian Government and given a laissez-passer 
by the military Governor of Antwerp permit- 
ting me to pass at will through both the outer 
and inner lines of fortifications, that a motor- 
car and a military driver were placed at my 
disposal, and that throughout the campaign in 
Flanders I was permitted to accompany the 
Belgian forces in the field, was not due to 
any peculiar merits or qualifications of my 
own, or even to the influence exerted by the 
powerful paper which I represented, but to a 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS ii 

series of unusual and fortunate circumstances 
which there is no need to detail here. There 
were many correspondents who merited from 
sheer hard work what I received as a result 
of extraordinary good fortune. 

The civilians who were wandering, foot- 
loose and free, about the theatre of operations 
were by no means confined to the representa- 
tives of the Press; there was an amazing 
number of young EngHshmen and Americans 
w^ho described themselves as "attaches" and 
"consular couriers" and "diplomatic mes- 
sengers," and who intimated that they were 
engaged in all sorts of dangerous and important 
missions. Many of these were adventurous 
young men of means who had "come over to 
see the fun" and who had induced the Amer- 
ican diplomatic representatives in London and 
The Hague to give them despatches of more or 
less importance — usually less than more — to 
carry through to Antwerp and Brussels. In 
at least one instance the official envelopes with 
the big red seals which they so ostentatiously 
displayed contained nothing but sheets of 
blank paper. Their sole motive was in nearly 
all cases curiosity. They had no more business 



12 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

wandering about the war zone than they would 
have had wandering about a hospital where 
men were dying. Belgium was being slowly 
strangled; her villages had been burned, her 
fields laid waste, her capital was in the hands 
of the enemy, her people were battling for 
their national existence; yet these young men 
came in and demanded first-row seats, pre- 
cisely as though the war was a spectacle which 
was being staged for their special benefit. One 
youth, who in his busy moments practised 
law in Boston, though quite frankly admitting 
that he was only actuated by curiosity, was 
exceedingly angry with me because I declined 
to take him to the firing-line. He seemed to 
regard the desperate battle which was then in 
progress for the possession of Antwerp very 
much as though it was a football game in the 
Harvard stadium; he seemed to think that 
he had a right to see it. He said that he had 
come all the way from Boston to see a battle, 
and when I remained firm in my refusal to 
take him to the front he intimated quite 
plainly that I was no gentleman and that 
nothing would give him greater pleasure than to 
have a shell explode in my immediate vicinity. 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 13 

For all its grimness, the war was productive 
of more than one amusing episode. I re- 
member a mysterious stranger who called one 
morning on the American Consul at Ostend 
to ask for assistance in getting through to 
Brussels. When the Consul asked him to be 
seated he bowed stiffly and declined, and when 
a seat was again urged upon him he explained, 
in a hoarse whisper, that sewn in his trousers 
were ten thousand dollars in bank-notes which 
he was taking through to Brussels for the relief 
of stranded English and Americans — hence he 
couldn't very well sit down. 

Of all the horde of adventurous characters 
who were drawn to the Continent on the out- 
break of war as iron filings are attracted by a 
magnet, I doubt if there was a more picturesque 
figure than a little photographer from Kansas 
named Donald Thompson. I met him first 
while paying a flying visit to Ostend. He 
blew into the Consulate there wearing an 
American army shirt, a pair of British officer's 
riding-breeches, French puttees, and a High- 
lander's forage-cap, and carrying a camera 
the size of a parlor phonograph. No one 
but an American could have accomplished 



14 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

what he had, and no American but one from 
Kansas. He had not only seen war, all military 
prohibitions to the contrary, but he had actu- 
ally photographed it. 

Thompson is a little man, built like Harry 
Lauder; hard as nails, tough as raw-hide, his 
skin tanned to the color of a well-smoked 
meerschaum, and his face perpetually wreathed 
in what he called his "sunflower smile." He 
affects riding-breeches and leather leggings and 
looks, physically as well as sartorially, as though 
he had been born on horseback. He has more 
chilled-steel nerve than any man I know, and 
before he had been in Belgium a month his 
name became a synonym throughout the army 
for coolness and daring. He reached Europe 
on a tramp steamer with an overcoat, a tooth- 
brush, two clean handkerchiefs, and three large 
cameras. He expected to have some of them 
confiscated or broken, he explained, so he 
brought along three as a measure of precaution. 
His cameras were the largest size made. "By 
using a big camera no one can possibly accuse 
me of being a spy," he explained ingenuously. 
His papers consisted of an American passport, 
a certificate of membership in the Benevolent 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 15 

and Protective Order of Elks, and a letter from 
Colonel Sam Hughes, Canadian Minister of 
Militia, authorizing him to take pictures of 
Canadian troops wherever found. 

Thompson made nine attempts to get from 
Paris to the front. He was arrested eight 
times and spent eight nights in guard-houses. 
Each time he was taken before a military 
tribunal. Utterly ignoring the subordinates, 
he would insist on seeing the officer in com- 
mand. He would grasp the astonished French- 
man by the hand and inquire solicitously after 
his health and that of his family. 

"How many languages do you speak?" I j 
asked him. 

"Three," said he, "English, American, 
and Yankee." 

On one occasion he commandeered a motor- 
cycle standing outside a cafe and rode it until 
the petrol ran out, whereupon he abandoned 
it by the roadside and pushed on afoot. On 
another occasion he explained to the French 
officer who arrested him that he was endeavor- 
ing to rescue his wife and children, who were 
in the hands of the Germans somewhere on 
the Belgian frontier. The officer was so 



i6 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

affected by the pathos of the story that he 
gave Thompson a lift in his car. As a matter 
of fact, Thompson's wife and family were quite 
safe in Topeka, Kansas. Whenever he was 
stopped by patrols he would display his letter 
from the Minister of Militia and explain that 
he was trying to overtake the Canadian troops. 
"Vive le Canada!" the French would shout 
enthusiastically. "Hurrah for our brave allies, 
les Canadiens ! They are doubtless with the 
British at the front" — and permit him to 
proceed. Thompson did not think it neces- 
sary to inform them that the nearest Canadian 
troops were still at Quebec. 

When within sound of the German guns 
he was arrested for the eighth time and sent 
to Amiens escorted by two gendarmes, who 
were ordered to see him aboard the first train 
for Boulogne. They evidently considered that 
they had followed instructions when they saw 
him buy a through ticket for London. Shortly 
after midnight a train loaded with wounded 
pulled into the station. Assisted by some 
British soldiers, Thompson scrambled to the 
top of a train standing at the next platform 
and made a flashlight picture. A wild panic 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 17 

ensued in the crowded station. It was thought 
that a German bomb had exploded. Thomp- 
son was pulled down by the police and would 
have been roughly handled had it not been 
for the interference of his British friends, who 
said that he belonged to their regiment. 
Shortly afterwards a train loaded with artillery 
which was being rushed to the front came in. 
Thompson, once more aided and abetted by 
the British Tommies, slipped under the tar- 
paulin covering a field-gun and promptly fell 
asleep. When he awoke the next morning 
he was at Mons. A regiment of Highlanders 
was passing. He exchanged a cake of choco- 
late for a fatigue-cap and fell in with them. 
After marching for two hours the regiment 
was ordered into the trenches. Thompson 
went into the trenches too. All through that 
terrible day Thompson plied his trade as the 
soldiers plied theirs. They used their rifles 
and he used his camera. Men were shot dead 
on either side of him. A storm of shrapnel 
shrieked and howled overhead. He said that 
the fire of the German artillery was amazingly 
accurate and rapid. They would concentrate 
their entire fire on a single regiment or battery 



i8 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

and when that regiment or battery was out of 
action they would turn to another and do the 
same thing over again. When the British 
fell back before the German onset Thompsoa 
remained in the trenches long enough to get 
pictures of the charging Germans. Then he 
ran for his life. 

That night he bivouacked with a French 
line regiment, the men giving him food and a 
blanket. The next morning he set out for 
Amiens en route for England. As the train 
for Boulogne, packed to the doors with refugees^ 
was pulling out of the Amiens station, he 
noticed a first-class compartment marked 
** Reserved," the only occupant being a smartly 
gowned young woman. Thompson said that 
she was very good-looking. The train was 
moving, but Thompson took a running jump 
and dived head foremost through the window, 
landing in the lady's lap. She was considerably 
startled until he said that he was an American. 
That seemed to explain everything. The 
young woman proved to be a Russian countess 
who had been living in Paris and who was 
returning, via England, to Petrograd. The 
French Government had placed a compart- 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 19 

ment at her disposal, but in the jam at the 
Paris station she had become separated from 
her maid, who had the bag containing her 
money. Thompson recounted his adventures 
at Mons and asked her if she would 
smuggle his films into England concealed on 
her person, as he knew from previous experi- 
ence that he would be stopped and searched 
by Scotland Yard detectives when the train 
reached Boulogne and that, in all probability, 
the films would be confiscated or else held up 
so long that they would be valueless. The 
countess finally consented, but suggested, 
in return for the danger she was incurring, 
that Thompson lend her a thousand francs, 
which she would return as soon as she reached 
London. As he had with him only two 
hundred and fifty francs, he paid her the 
balance in United Cigar Stores coupons, some 
of which he chanced to have in his pocket-book, 
and which, he explained, was American war 
currency. He told me that he gave her almost 
enough to get a brier pipe. At Boulogne he 
was arrested, as he had foreseen, was stripped, 
searched, and his camera opened, but as nothing 
was found he was permitted to continue to 



20 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

London, where he went to the countess's hotel 
and received his films — and, I might add, his 
money and cigar coupons. Two hours later, 
having posted his films to America, he was on 
his way to Belgium. 

" Landing at Ostend, he managed to get by 
train as far as Malines. He then started to 
walk the twenty-odd miles into Brussels, 
^carrying his huge camera, his overcoat, field- 
glasses, and three hundred films. When ten 
miles down the highway a patrol of Uhlans 
suddenly spurred out from behind a hedge 
and covered him with their pistols. Thompson 
promptly pulled a little silk American flag out 
of his pocket and shouted '^Hoch der Kaiser T* 
and "Auf wiedersehuy' which constituted his 
entire stock of German. Upon being examined 
by the officer in command of the German 
outpost, he explained that his Canadian creden- 
tials were merely a blind to get through the 
lines of the Allies and that he really represented 
a syndicate of German newspapers in America, 
whereupon he was released with apologies and 
given a seat in an ambulance which was going 
into Brussels. As his funds were by this time 
running low, he started out to look for inexpen- 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 21 

sive lodgings. As he remarked to me, "I 
thought we had some pretty big house-agents 
out in Kansas, but this *Mr. A. Louer' has 
them beaten a mile. Why, that fellow has 
his card on every house that's for rent in 
Brussels !" 

The next morning, while chatting with a 
pretty English girl in front of a cafe, a German 
officer who was passing ordered his arrest as 
a spy. "All right," said Thompson, "Fm 
used to being arrested, but would you mind 
waiting just a minute until I get your picture ?" 
The German, who had no sense of humor, 
promptly smashed the camera with his sword. 
Despite Thompson's protestations that he was 
an inoffensive American, the Germans destroyed 
all his films and ordered him to be out of the 
city before six that evening. He walked the 
thirty miles to Ghent and there caught a train 
for Ostend to get one of his reserve cameras, 
which he had cached there. When I met 
him in Ostend he said that he had been there 
overnight, that he was tired of a quiet life and 
was looking for action, so I took him back with 
me to Antwerp. The Belgians had made an 
inflexible rule that no photographers would 



22 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

be permitted with the army, but before 
Thompson had been in Antwerp twenty-four 
hours he had obtained permission from the 
Chief of the General Staff himself to take 
pictures when and where he pleased. Thomp- 
son remained with me until the fall of Antwerp 
and the German occupation, and no man could 
have had a more loyal or devoted companion. 
It is no exaggeration to say that he saw more 
of the campaign in Flanders than any indi- 
vidual, military or civilian — "le Capitaine 
Thompson," as he came to be known, being a 
familiar and popular figure on the Belgian 
battle-line. 

There is one other person of whom passing 
mention should be made, if for no other reason 
than because his name will appear from time 
to time in this narrative. I take pleasure, 
therefore, in introducing you to M. Marcel 
Roos, the young Belgian gentleman who drove 
my motor-car. When war was declared, Roos, 
who belonged to the jeunesse doree of Brussels, 
gave his own ninety horse-power car to the 
Government and enlisted in a regiment of 
grenadiers. Because he was as familiar with 
the highways and byways of Belgium as a 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 23 

housewife is with her kitchen, and because he 
spoke Enghsh, French, Flemish, and German, 
he was detailed to drive the car which the 
Belgian Government placed at my disposal. 
He was as big and loyal and good-natured as a 
St. Bernard dog and he was as cool in danger 
as Thompson — which is the highest compli- 
ment I can pay him. Incidentally, he was 
the most successful forager that I have ever 
seen; more than once, in villages which had 
apparently been swept clean of everything 
edible by the Belgians or the Germans, he 
produced quite an excellent dinner as mys- 
teriously as a conjurer produces rabbits from 
a hat. 

Now you must bear in mind that although 
one could get into Antwerp with comparative 
ease, it by no means followed that one could 
get out to the firing-line. A long procession 
of correspondents came to Antwerp and re- 
mained a day or so and then went away again 
without once getting beyond the city gates. 
Even if one succeeded in obtaining the neces- 
sary laissez-passer from the military Govern- 
ment, there was no way of reaching the front, 
as all the automobiles and all except the most 



24 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

decrepit horses had been requisitioned for the 
use of the army. There was, you understand, 
no such thing as hiring an automobile, or even 
buying one. Even the few people who had 
influence enough to retain their cars found 
them useless, as one of the very first acts of 
the military authorities was to commandeer 
the entire supply of petrol. The bulk of the 
cars were used in the ambulance service or 
for purposes of transport, the army train con- 
sisting entirely of motor-vehicles. Staff-officers, 
certain Government officials, and members of 
the diplomatic and consular corps were pro- 
vided by the Government with automobiles 
and military drivers. Every one else walked 
or used the trams. Thus it frequently hap- 
pened that a young staff-officer, who had never 
before known the joys of motoring, would tear 
madly down the street in a luxurious limousine, 
his spurred boots resting on the broadcloth 
cushions, while the ci-devant owner of the car, 
who might be a banker or a merchant prince, 
would jump for the sidewalk to escape being 
run down. With the declaration of war and 
the taking over of all automobiles by the mili- 
tary, all speed laws were flung to the winds. 



THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS 25 

No matter how unimportant his business, every 
one tore through the city streets as though the 
devil (or the Germans) were behind him. The 
staid citizens of Antwerp quickly developed a 
remarkable agility in getting out of the way of 
furiously driven cars. They had to. Other- 
wise they would have been killed. 

Because, from the middle of August to the 
middle of October, Antwerp was the capital 
of Belgium and the seat of the King, Cabinet, 
and diplomatic corps; because from it any 
point on the battle-front could easily be 
reached by motor-car; and because, above all 
else, it was at the end of the cable and the one 
place in Belgium where there was any certainty 
of despatches getting through to England, I 
made it my headquarters during the operations 
in Flanders, going out to the front in the 
morning and returning to the Hotel St. Antoine 
at night. I doubt if war correspondence has 
ever been carried on under such comfortable, 
even luxurious, conditions. "Going out to the 
front" became as commonplace^ a proceed- 
ing as for a commuter to take the morning 
train to the city. For one whose previous 
campaigning had been done in Persia and 



26 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

Mexico and North Africa and the Balkans, it 
was a novel experience to leave a large and 
fashionable hotel after breakfast, take a run 
of twenty or thirty miles over stone-paved 
roads in a powerful and comfortable car, 
witness a battle — provided, of course, that 
there happened to be a battle on that day's 
list of events — and get back to the hotel in 
time to dress for dinner. Imagine it, if you 
please ! Imagine leaving a line of battle, 
where shells were shrieking overhead and mus- 
ketry was crackling along the trenches, and 
moaning, blood-smeared figures were being 
placed in ambulances and other blood-smeared 
figures who no longer moaned were sprawled 
in strange attitudes upon the ground — imagine 
leaving such a scene, I say, and in an hour, or 
€ven less, finding oneself in a hotel where men 
and women in evening dress were dining by the 
light of pink-shaded candles, or in the marble- 
paved palm court were sipping coffee and 
liqueurs to the sound of water splashing gently 
in a fountain. 



II 

THE CITY OF GLOOM 

IN order to grasp the true significance of the 
events which preceded and led up to the 
fall of Antwerp, it is necessary to under- 
stand the extraordinary conditions which ex- 
isted in and around that city when I reached 
there the middle of August. At that time all 
that was left to the Belgians of Belgium were 
the provinces of Limbourg and East and West 
Flanders. Everything else was in the posses- 
sion of the Germans. Suppose, for the sake 
of having things quite clear, that you unfold 
the map of Belgium. Now, with your pencil, 
draw a line across the country from east to 
west, starting at the Dutch city of Maastricht 
and passing through Hasselt, Diest, Aerschot, 
MaUnes, Alost, and Courtrai to the French 
frontier. This line was, roughly speaking, 
"the front," and for upwards of two months 
fighting of a more or less serious character took 
place along its entire length. During August 
and the early part of September this fighting 

consisted, for the most part, of attempts by 

27 



28 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

the Belgian field army to harass the enemy and 
to threaten his lines of communication and of 
counter-attacks by the Germans, during which 
Aerschot, M alines, Sempst, and Termonde 
repeatedly changed hands. Some twenty miles 
or so behind this line was the great fortified 
position of Antwerp, its outer chain of forts 
enclosing an area with a radius of nearly fifteen 
miles. 

Antwerp, with its population of four hun- 
dred thousand souls, its labyrinth of dim and 
winding streets lined by mediaeval houses, and 
its splendid modern boulevards, lies on the 
east bank of the Scheldt, about fifteen miles 
from Dutch territorial waters, at a hairpin- 
turn in the river. The defences of the city 
were modern, extensive, and generally believed, 
even by military experts, to be little short of 
impregnable. In fact, Antwerp was almost 
universally considered one of the three or four 
strongest fortified positions in Europe. In 
order to capture the city it would be necessary 
for an enemy to break through four distinct 
lines of defence, any one of which, it was 
believed, was strong enough to successfully 
oppose any force which could be brought 



THE CITY OF GLOOM 29 

against it. The outermost line of forts began 
at Lierre, a dozen miles to the southeast of 
the city, and swept in a great quarter-circle, 
through Wavre-St. Catherine, Waelhem, Heyn- 
donck, and Willebroeck, to the Scheldt at 
Ruppelmonde. Two or three miles behind 
this outer line of forts a second line of defence 
was formed by the Rupel and the Nethe, 
which, together with the Scheldt, make a great 
natural waterway around three sides of the city. 
Back of these rivers, again, was a second chain 
of forts completely encircling the city on a 
five-mile radius. The moment that the first 
German soldier set his foot on Belgian soil the 
military authorities began the herculean task 
of clearing of trees and buildings a great zone 
lying between this inner circle of forts and the 
city ramparts in order that an investing force 
might have no cover. It is estimated that 
within a fortnight the Belgian sappers and 
engineers destroyed property to the value of 
$8o,ooo,cxx). Not San Francisco after the 
earthquake, nor Dayton after the flood, nor 
Salem after the fire presented scenes of more 
complete desolation than did the suburbs of Ant- 
werp after the soldiers had finished with them. 



30 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

On August I, 1 9 14, no city in all Europe 
could boast of more beautiful suburbs than 
Antwerp. Hidden amid the foliage of great 
wooded parks were stately chateaux; splendid 
country houses rose from amid acres of green 
plush lawns and blazing gardens; the network 
of roads and avenues and bridle-paths were 
lined with venerable trees, whose branches, 
meeting overhead, formed leafy tunnels; scat- 
tered here and there were quaint old-world 
villages, with plaster walls and pottery roofs 
and lichen-covered church spires. By the last 
day of August all this had disappeared. The 
loveliest suburbs in Europe had been wiped 
from the earth as a sponge wipes figures from 
a slate. Every house and church and windmill, 
every tree and hedge and wall, in a zone some 
two or three miles wide by twenty long, was 
literally levelled to the ground. For mile after 
mile the splendid trees which Hned the high- 
roads were ruthlessly cut down; mansions 
which could fittingly have housed a king were 
dynamited; churches whose walls had echoed 
to the tramp of the Duke of Alva's mail-clad 
men-at-arms were levelled; villages whose 
picturesqueness was the joy of artists and 



( 




THE CITY OF GLOOM 31 

travellers were given over to the flames. Cer- 
tainly not since the burning of Moscow has 
there been witnessed such a scene of self- 
inflicted desolation. When the work of the 
engineers was finished a jack-rabbit could not 
have approached the forts without being seen. 
When the work of levelling had been com- 
pleted, acres upon acres of barbed-wire entan- 
glements were constructed, the wires being 
grounded and connected with the city lighting 
system so that a voltage could instantly be 
turned on which would prove as deadly as 
the electric chair at Sing Sing. Thousands of 
men were set to work sharpening stakes and 
driving these stakes, point upward, in the 
ground, so as to impale any soldiers who fell 
upon them. In front of the stakes were "man- 
traps," thousands of barrels with their heads 
knocked out being set in the ground and then 
covered with a thin layer of laths and earth, 
which would suddenly give way if a man 
walked upon it and drop him into the hole 
below. And beyond the zones of entangle- 
ments and chevaux de frise and man-traps the 
beet and potato fields were sown with mines 
which were to be exploded by electricity when 



32 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

the enemy was fairly over them and blow that 
enemy, whole regiments at a time, into the 
air. Stretching across the fields and meadows 
were what looked at first glance like enormous 
red-brown serpents but which proved, upon 
closer inspection, to be trenches for infantry. 
The region to the south of Antwerp is a net- 
work of canals, and on the bank of every canal 
rose, as though by magic, parapets of sand- 
bags. Charges of dynamite were placed under 
every bridge and viaduct and tunnel. Barri- 
cades of paving-stones and mattresses and 
sometimes farm carts were built across the high- 
ways. At certain points wires were stretched 
across the roads at the height of a man's head 
for the purpose of preventing sudden dashes 
by armored motor-cars. The walls of such 
buildings as were left standing were loopholed 
for musketry. Machine guns and quick-firers 
were mounted everywhere. At night the 
white beams of the search-lights swept this 
zone of desolation and turned it into day. 
Now the pitiable thing about it was that all 
this enormous destruction proved to have been 
wrought for nothing, for the Germans, instead 
of throwing huge masses of infantry against 



THE CITY OF GLOOM 33 

the forts, as it was anticipated that they would 
do, and thus giving the entanglements and 
the mine-fields and the machine guns a chance 
to get in their work, methodically pounded the 
forts to pieces with siege-guns stationed a 
dozen miles away. In fact, when the Germans 
entered Antwerp not a strand of barbed wire 
had been cut, not a barricade defended, not a 
mine exploded. This, mind you, was not due 
to any lack of bravery on the part of the 
Belgians — Heaven knows, they did not lack 
for that ! — but to the fact that the Germans 
never gave them a chance to make use of these 
elaborate and ingenious devices. It was like a 
man letting a child painstakingly construct an 
edifice of building-blocks and then, when it 
was completed, suddenly sweeping it aside 
with his hand. 

As a result of these elaborate precautions, 
it was as difficult to go in or out of Antwerp 
as it is popularly supposed to be for a mil- 
lionaire to enter the kingdom of Heaven. 
Sentries were as thick as policemen on Broad- 
way. You could not proceed a quarter of a 
mile along any road, in any direction, without 
being halted by a harsh ''Qui viveF** and 



34 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

having the business end of a rifle turned in 
your direction. If your papers were not in 
order you were promptly turned back — or 
arrested as a suspicious character and taken 
before an officer for examination — though if 
you were sufficiently in the confidence of the 
military authorities to be given the password, 
you were usually permitted to pass without 
further question. It was some time before I 
lost the thrill of novelty and excitement pro- 
duced by this halt-who-goes-there-advance- 
friend-and-give-the-countersign business. It 
was so exactly the sort of thing that, as a boy, 
I used to read about in books by George A. 
Henty that it seemed improbable and unreal. 
When we were motoring at night and a per- 
emptory challenge would come from out the 
darkness and the lamps of the car would pick 
out the cloaked figure of the sentry as the spot- 
light picks out the figure of an actor on the 
stage, and I would lean forward and whisper 
the magic mot d'ordre, I always had the feeling 
that I was taking part in a play — ^which was 
not so very far from the truth, for, though I 
did not appreciate it at the time, we were all 
actors, more or less important, in the greatest 
drama ever staged. 



THE CITY OF GLOOM 35 

In the immediate vicinity of Antwerp the 
sentries were soldiers of the regular army 
and understood a sentry's duties, but in the 
outlying districts, particularly between Ostend 
and Ghent, the roads were patrolled by 
members of the Garde civique, all of whom 
seemed imbued with the idea that the safety 
of the nation depended upon their vigilance, 
which was a very commendable and proper 
attitude indeed. When I was challenged by 
a Garde civique I was always a little nervous, 
and wasted no time whatever in jamming on 
the brakes, because the poor fellows were 
nearly always excited and handled their rifles in 
a fashion which was far from being reassuring. 
More than once, while travelling in the out- 
lying districts, we were challenged by civil 
guards who evidently had not been intrusted 
with the password, but who, when it was 
whispered to them, would nod their heads 
importantly and tell us to pass on. 

"The next sentry that we meet," I said to 
Roos on one of these occasions, ** probably 
has no idea of the password. Fll bet you a 
box of cigars that I can give him any word 
that comes into my head and that he won't 
know the difference." 



36 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

As we rolled over the ancient drawbridge 
which gives admittance to sleepy Bruges, a 
bespectacled sentry, who looked as though he 
had suddenly been called from an accountant's 
desk to perform the duties of a soldier, held 
up his hand, palm outward, which is the signal 
to stop the world over. 

"Halt!'' he commanded quaveringly. "Ad- 
vance slowly and give the word." 

I leaned out as the car came opposite him. 
"Kalamazoo," I whispered. The next instant 
I was looking into the muzzle of his rifle. 

"Hands up!" he shouted, and there was 
no longer any quaver in his voice. "That is 
not the word. I shouldn't be surprised if 
you were German spies. Get out of the car!" 

It took half an hour of explanations to con- 
vince him that we were not German spies, 
that we really did know the password, and 
that we were merely having a joke — though 
not, as we had planned, at his expense. 

The force of citizen soldiery known as the 
Garde civiqucy has, so far as I am aware, no 
exact counterpart in any other country. It 
is composed of business and professional men 
whose chief duties, prior to the war, had 



THE CITY OF GLOOM 37 

been to show themselves on occasions of cere- 
mony arrayed in gorgeous uniforms, which 
varied according to the province. The mounted 
division of the Antwerp Garde civique wore a 
green-and-scarlet uniform which resembled as 
closely as possible that of the Guides, the 
crack cavalry corps of the Belgian army. In 
the Flemish towns the civil guards wore a 
blue coat, so long in the skirts that it had to 
be buttoned back to permit of their walking, 
and a hat of stiff black felt, resembling a bowler, 
with a feather stuck rakishly in the band. Early 
in the war the Germans announced that they 
would not recognize the Gardes civiques as 
combatants, and that any of them who were 
captured while fighting would meet with the 
same fate as armed civilians. This drastic 
ruling resulted in many amusing episodes. 
When it was learned that the Germans were 
approaching Ghent, sixteen hundred civil 
guardsmen threw their rifles into the canal 
and, stripping off their uniforms, ran about 
in the pink and light-blue undergarments 
which the Belgians affect, frantically begging 
the townspeople to lend them civilian clothing. 
As a whole, however, these citizen soldiers did 



38 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

admirable service, guarding the roads, tunnels, 
and bridges, assisting the refugees, preserving 
order in the towns, and, in Antwerp, taking 
entire charge of provisioning the army. 

No account of Antwerp in war time would 
be complete without at least passing mention 
of the boy scouts, who were one of the city's ' 
most picturesque and interesting features. I 
don't quite know how the city could have 
gotten along without them. They were always 
on the job; they were to be seen everywhere 
and they did everything. They acted as 
messengers, as doorkeepers, as guides, as order- 
lies for staff-officers, and as couriers for the 
various ministries; they ran the elevators in 
the hotels, they worked in the hospitals, they 
assisted the refugees to find food and lodgings. 
The boy scouts stationed at the various minis- 
tries were on duty twenty-four hours at a 
stretch. They slept rolled up in blankets on 
the floors; they obtained their meals where 
and when they could and paid for them them- 
selves, and made themselves extremely useful. 
If you possessed sufficient influence to obtain 
a motor-car, a boy scout was generally detailed 
to sit beside the driver and open the door and 




m 



o 
pq 



V 



■^3 



c! 4^42 



tc 



SE 



THE CITY OF GLOOM 39 

act as a sort of orderly. I had one. His name 
was Joseph. He was most picturesque. He 
wore a sombrero with a cherry-colored pug- 
garee and a bottle-green cape, and his green 
stockings turned over at the top so as to show 
knees as white and shapely as those of a woman. 
To tell the truth, however, I had nothing for 
him to do. So when I was not out in the car 
he occupied himself in running the lift at the 
Hotel St. Antoine. Joseph was with me 
during the German attack on Waelhem. We 
were caught in a much hotter place than we 
intended and for half an hour were under 
heavy shrapnel fire. I was curious to see how 
the youngster — for he was only fourteen — 
would act. Finally he turned to me, his black 
eyes snapping with excitement. "Have I 
your permission to go a little nearer, mon- 
sieur?" he asked eagerly. "I won't be gone 
long. I only want to get a German helmet." 
It may have been the valor of ignorance 
which these broad-hatted, bare-kneed boys 
displayed, but it was the sort of valor which 
characterized every Belgian soldier. There was 
one youngster of thirteen who was attached 
to an officer of the staff and who was present 



40 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

at every battle of importance from the evac- 
uation of Brussels to the fall of Antwerp. I 
remember seeing him during the retreat of the 
Belgians from Wesemael, curled up in the ton- 
neau of a car and sleeping through all the 
turmoil and confusion. I felt like waking him 
up and saying sternly: "Look here, sonny, 
you'd better trot on home. Your mother will 
be worried to death about you." I believe 
that four Belgian boy scouts gave up their 
lives in the service of their country. Two 
were run down and killed by automobiles while 
on duty in Antwerp. Two others were, I 
understand, shot by German troops near 
Brussels while attempting to carry despatches 
through the lines. One boy scout became so 
adept at this sort of work that he was regularly 
employed by the Government to carry mes- 
sages through to its agents in Brussels. His 
exploits would provide material for a boy's 
book of adventure and, as a fitting conclusion, 
he was decorated by the King. 

Any one who went to Belgium with hard- 
and-fast ideas as to social distinctions quickly 
had them shattered. The fact that a man 
wore a private's uniform and sat behind the 



THE CITY OF GLOOM 41 

steering-wheel of your car and respectfully 
touched his cap when you gave him an order 
did not imply that he had always been a 
chauffeur. Roos, who drove my car through- 
out my stay in Belgium, was the son of a 
Brussels millionaire, and at the beginning of 
hostilities had, as I think I have mentioned 
elsewhere, promptly presented his own power- 
ful car to the Government. The aristocracy 
of Belgium did not hang around the Ministry 
of War trying to obtain commissions. They 
simply donned privates' uniforms, and went 
into the firing-line. As a result of this whole- 
hearted patriotism the ranks of the Belgian 
army were filled with men who were members 
of the most exclusive clubs and were welcome 
guests in the highest social circles in Europe. 
Almost any evening during the earlier part of 
the war a smooth-faced youth in the uniform 
of a private soldier could have been seen sit- 
ting amid a group of friends at dinner in the 
Hotel St. Antoine. When an officer entered 
the room he stood up and clicked his heels 
together and saluted. He was Prince Henri 
de Ligne, a member of one of the oldest 
and most distinguished families in Belgium 



42 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

and related to half the aristocracy of Europe. 
He, poor boy, was destined never again to fol- 
low the hounds or to lead a cotillon; he was 
killed near Herenthals with young Count de 
Villemont and Philippe de Zualart while en- 
gaged in a daring raid in an armored motor-car 
into the German lines for the purpose of blow- 
ing up a bridge. 

When, upon the occupation of Brussels by 
the Germans, the capital of Belgium was hastily 
transferred to Antwerp, considerable difficulty 
was experienced in finding suitable accommo- 
dations for the staffs of the various ministries, 
which were housed in any buildings which 
happened to be available at the time. Thus, 
the foreign relations of the nation were di- 
rected from a school building in the Avenue 
du Commerce — the Foreign Minister, Monsieur 
Davignon, using as his cabinet the room 
formerly used for lectures on physiology, the 
walls of which were still covered with black- 
boards and anatomical charts. The Grand 
Hotel was taken over by the Government for 
the accommodation of the Cabinet Ministers 
and their staffs, while the Ministers of State 
and the members of the diplomatic corps were 



THE CITY OF GLOOM 43 

quartered at the St. Antoine. In fact, it used 
to be said in fun that if you got into difficulties 
with the poHce all you had to do was to get 
within the doors of the hotel, where you would 
be safe, for half of the ground floor was tech- 
nically British soil, being occupied by the 
British Legation; a portion of the second floor 
was used by the Russian Legation; if you dashed 
into a certain bedroom you could claim 
Roumanian protection, and in another you 
were, theoretically, in Greece; while on the 
upper floor extraterritoriality was exercised 
by the RepubHc of China. Every evening all 
the ministers and diplomats met in the big 
rose-and-ivory dining-room — the white shirt- 
fronts of the men and the white shoulders of 
the women, with the uniforms of the Belgian 
officers and of the British, French and Russian 
military attaches, combining to form a wonder- 
fully brilliant picture. Looking on that scene, it 
was hard to believe that by ascending to the roof 
of the hotel you could see the glare of burning 
villages and hear the boom of German cannon. 
As the siege progressed and the German lines 
were drawn tighter, the military regulations 
governing life in Antwerp increased in severity. 



44 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

The local papers were not permitted to print 
any accounts of Belgian checks or reverses, 
and at one time the importation of English 
newspapers was suspended. Sealed letters were 
not accepted by the post-office for any foreign 
countries save England, Russia and France, 
and even these were held four days before 
being forwarded. Telegrams were, of course, 
rigidly censored. The telephone service was 
suspended save for governmental purposes. 
At eight o'clock the trams stopped running. 
Save for a few ramshackle vehicles, drawn by 
decrepit horses, the cabs had disappeared from 
the streets. The city went spy-mad. If a 
man ordered Sauerkraut and sausage for lunch 
he instantly fell under suspicion. Scarcely a 
day passed without houses being raided and 
their occupants arrested on the charge of 
espionage. It was reported and generally 
believed that those whose guilt was proved 
were promptly executed outside the ramparts, 
but of this I have my doubts. The Belgians 
are too good-natured, too easy-going. It is 
probable, of course, that some spies were 
executed, but certainly not many. 

One never stirred out-of-doors in Antwerp 



THE CITY OF GLOOM 45 

without one's papers, which had to be shown 
before one could gain admission to the post- 
office, the telegraph bureau, the banks, the 
railway stations, or any other public buildings. 
There were several varieties of "papers." 
There was the plain passport, which, beyond 
establishing your nationality, was not worth 
the paper it was written on. There was the 
permis de sejour, which was issued by the police 
to those who were able to prove that they had 
business which necessitated their remaining 
in the city. And finally, there was the much- 
prized laissez-passer, which was issued by the 
military government and usually bore the 
photograph of the person to whom it was 
given, which proved an open sesame wherever 
shown, and which, I might add, was exceedingly 
difficult to obtain. 

Only once did my laissez-passer fail me. 
During the final days of the siege, when the 
temper and endurance of the Belgian defenders 
were strained almost to the breaking-point, 
I motored out to witness the German assault 
on the forts near Willebroeck. With me were 
Captain Raymond Briggs of the United States 
army and Thompson. Before continuing to 



46 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

the front we took the precaution of stopping 
at division headquarters in Boom and asking 
if there was any objection to our proceeding; 
we were informed that there was none. We 
had not been on the firing-Hne half an hour, 
however, before two gendarmes came tearing 
up in a motor-car and informed us that we 
were under arrest and must return with them 
to Boom. At division headquarters we were 
interrogated by a staff major whose temper 
was as fiery as his hair. Thompson, as was 
his invariable custom, was smoking a very large 
and very black cigar. 

'*Take that cigar out of your mouth!" 
snapped the major in French. "How dare 
you smoke in my presence .^" 

"Sorry, major," said Thompson, grinning 
broadly, "but you'll have to talk American. 
I don't understand French." 

"Stop smiling!" roared the now infuriated 
officer. "How dare you smile when I address 
you .? This is no time for smiling, sir ! This 
is a time of war !" 

Though the major was reluctantly forced 
to admit that our papers were in order, we 
were nevertheless sent to staff headquarters in 



THE CITY OF GLOOM 47 

Antwerp guarded by two gendarmes, one of 
whom was the bearer of a dossier in which it 
was gravely recited that Captain Briggs and I 
had been arrested while in the company of a 
person calling himself Donald Thompson, who 
was charged by the chief of staff with having 
ismiled and smoked a cigar in his presence. 
Needless to say, the whole opera-houffe affair 
was promptly disavowed by the higher author- 
ities. I have mentioned the incident because 
it was the sole occasion on which I met with 
so much as a shadow of discourtesy from any 
Belgian, either soldier or civihan. I doubt if 
in any other country in the world in time of 
war, a foreigner would have been permitted 
to go where and when he pleased, as I was, 
and would have met with hospitality and 
kindness from every one. 

The citizens of Antwerp hated the Germans 
with a deeper and more bitter hatred, if such 
a thing were possible, than the people of any 
other part of Belgium. This was due to the 
fact that in no foreign city where Germans 
dwelt and did business were they treated with 
such marked hospitality and consideration as 
in Antwerp. They had been given franchises; 



48 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

and concessions and privileges of every descrip- 
tion; they had been showered with honors 
and decorations; they were welcome guests 
on every occasion; city streets had been named 
after leading German residents; time and 
time again, both at private dinners and public 
banquets, they had asserted, wine-glass in hand, 
their loyalty and devotion to the city which 
was their home. Yet, the moment oppor- 
tunity offered, they did not scruple to betray 
it. In the cellar of the house belonging to 
one of the most prominent German residents 
the police found large stores of ammunition 
and hundreds of rifles and German uniforms. 
A German company had, as a result of criminal 
stupidity, been awarded the contract for wir- 
ing the forts defending the city — and when 
the need arose it w^as found that the wiring 
was all but worthless. A wealthy German had 
a magnificent country estate the gardens of 
which ran down to the moat of one of the 
outlying forts. One day he suggested to the 
military authorities that if they would permit 
him to obtain the necessary water from the 
moat, he would build a swimming pool in 
his garden for the use of the soldiers. What 



THE CITY OF GLOOM 49 

appeared to be a generous offer was gladly 
accepted — but when the day of action came 
it was found that the moat had been drained 
dry. In the grounds of another country place 
were discovered concrete emplacements for 
the use of the German siege-guns. Thus the 
German residents repaid the hospitality of 
their adopted city. 

When the war-cloud burst every German 
was promptly expelled from Antwerp. In a 
few cases the mob got out of hand and smashed 
the windows of some German saloons along the 
water-front, but no Germans were injured or 
mistreated. They were merely shipped, bag 
and baggage, across the frontier. That, in my 
opinion at least, is what should have been 
done with the entire civil population of 
Antwerp — provided, of course, that the Gov- 
ernment intended to hold the city at all costs. 
The civilians seriously hampered the move- 
ments of the troops and thereby interfered 
with the defence; the presence of large num- 
bers of women and children in the city dur- 
ing the bombardment unquestionably caused 
grave anxiety to the defenders and was prob- 
ably one of the chief reasons for the evac- 



so FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

uation taking place when it did; the 
masses of civilian fugitives who choked the 
roads in their mad flight from Antwerp were 
in large measure responsible for the capture 
of a considerable portion of the retreating 
Belgian army and for the fact that other 
bodies of troops were driven across the frontier 
and interned in Holland. So strongly was 
the belief that Antwerp was impregnable 
implanted in every Belgian's mind, however, 
that up to the very last not one citizen in a 
thousand would admit that there was a possi- 
bility that it could be taken. The army did 
not believe that it could be taken. The Gen- 
eral Staff did not believe that it could be 
taken. They were destined to have a rude 
and sad awakening. 



Ill 

THE DEATH IN THE AIR 

AT eleven minutes past one o'clock on 
/■^ the morning of August 25 death came 
to Antwerp out of the air. Some one 
had sent a bundle of English and American 
newspapers to my room in the Hotel St. 
Antoine and I had spent the evening reading 
them, so that the bells of the cathedral had 
already chimed one o'clock when I switched 
off my light and opened the window. As I 
did so my attention was attracted by a curious 
humming overhead, like a million bumble- 
bees. I leaned far out of the window, and as 
I did so an indistinct mass, which gradually 
resolved itself into something resembling a 
gigantic black cigar, became plainly apparent 
against the purple-velvet sky. I am not good 
at estimating altitudes, but I should say that 
when I first caught sight of it it was not more 
than a thousand feet above my head — and my 
room was on the top floor of the hotel, re- 
member. As it drew nearer the noise, which 
had at first reminded me of a swarm of angry 

SI 



52 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

bees, grew louder, until it sounded like an 
automobile with the muffler open. Despite 
the darkness there was no doubting what it was. 
It was a German Zeppelin. 

Even as I looked something resembling a 
falling star curved across the sky. An instant 
later came a rending, shattering crash that 
shook the hotel to its foundations, the walls of 
my room rocked and reeled about me, and for 
a breathless moment I thought that the build- 
ing was going to collapse. Perhaps thirty 
seconds later came another splitting explosion, 
and another, and then another — ten in all — 
each, thank Heaven, a little farther removed. 
It was all so sudden, so utterly unexpected, 
that it must have been quite a minute before 
I realized that the monstrous thing hovering 
in the darkness overhead was one of the diri- 
gibles of which we had read and talked so 
much, and that it was actually raining death 
upon the sleeping city from the sky. I suppose 
it was blind instinct that caused me to run to 
the door and down the corridor with the idea 
of getting into the street, never stopping to 
reason, of course, that there was no protection 
in the street from Zeppelins. But before I 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR 53 

had gone a dozen paces I had my nerves once 
more in hand. "Perhaps it isn't a ZeppeHn, 
after all," I argued to myself. "I may have 
been dreaming. And how perfectly ridiculous 
I should look if I were to dash down-stairs in 
my pajamas and find that nothing had hap- 
pened. At least ril go back and put some 
clothes on." And I did. No fireman, respond- 
ing to a night alarm, ever dressed quicker. As 
I ran through the corridors the doors of bed- 
rooms opened and sleepy-eyed, tousle-headed 
diplomatists and Government officials called 
after me to ask if the Germans were bombard- 
ing the city. 

"They are," I answered, without stopping. 
There was no time to explain that for the first 
time in history a city was being bombarded 
from the air. 

I found the lobby rapidly filling with scan- 
tily clad guests, whose teeth were visibly chat- 
tering. Guided by the hotel manager and 
accompanied by half a dozen members of the 
diplomatic corps in pajamas, I raced up-stairs 
to a sort of observatory on the hotel roof. I 
remember that one attache of the British 
Legation, ordinarily a most dignified person. 



54 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

had on some sort of a night-robe of purple silk 
and that when he started to climb the iron 
ladder of the fire-escape he looked for all the 
world like a burglarious suffragette. 

By the time we reached the roof of the hotel 
Belgian high-angle and machine guns were 
stabbing the darkness with spurts of flame, the 
troops of the garrison were blazing away with 
rifles, and the gendarmes in the streets were 
shooting wildly with their revolvers: the 
noise was deafening. Oblivious of the con- 
sternation and confusion it had caused, the 
Zeppelin, after letting fall a final bomb, slowly 
rose and disappeared in the upper darkness. 

The destruction wrought by the German 
projectiles was almost incredible. The first 
shell, which I had seen fall, struck a building 
in the Rue de Bourse, barely two hundred 
yards in a straight line from my window. A 
hole was not merely blown through the roof, 
as would have been the case with a shell from 
a field-gun, but the three upper stories simply 
crumbled, disintegrated, came crashing down 
in an avalanche of brick and stone and plaster, 
as though a Titan had hit it with a sledge- 
hammer. Another shell struck in the middle 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR 55 

of the Poids Public, or public weighing-place, 
which is about the size of Gramercy Park in 
New York. It blew a hole in the cobblestone 
pavement large enough to bury a horse in; 
one policeman on duty at the far end of the 
square was instantly killed and another had 
both legs blown off. But this was not all 
nor nearly all. Six people sleeping in houses 
fronting on the square were killed in their beds 
and a dozen others were more or less seriously 
wounded. Every building facing on the square 
was either wholly or partially demolished, the 
steel splinters of the projectile tearing their 
way through the thick brick walls as easily as 
a lead-pencil is jabbed through a sheet of paper. 
And, as a result of the terrific concussion, every 
house within a block of the square in every 
direction had its windows broken. On no 
battle-field have I ever seen so horrible a sight 
as that which turned me weak and nauseated 
when I entered one of the shattered houses and 
made my way, over heaps of fallen debris, to 
a room where a young woman had been sleep- 
ing. She had literally been blown to frag- 
ments. The floor, the walls, the ceiling, were 
splotched with — ^well, it*s enough to say that 



56 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

that woman's remains could only have been 
collected with a shovel, and Fm not speaking 
flippantly either. I have purposely dwelt upon 
these details, revolting as they are, because 
I wish to drive home the fact that the only 
victims of this air raid on Antwerp were inno- 
cent non-combatants. 

Another shell struck the roof of a physician's 
house in the fashionable Rue des Escrimeurs, 
killing two maids who were sleeping in a room 
on the upper floor. A shell fell in a garden 
in the Rue von Bary, terribly wounding a man 
and his wife. A little child was mangled by a 
shell which struck a house in the Rue de la 
Justice. Another shell fell in the barracks in 
the Rue Falcon, killing one inmate and wound- 
ing two others. By a fortunate coincidence 
the regiment which had been quartered in the 
barracks had left for the front on the previous 
day. A woman who was awakened by the 
first explosion and leaned from her window to 
see what was happening had her head blown 
off. In all ten people were killed, six of whom 
were women, and upwards of forty wounded, 
two of them so terribly that they afterwards 
died. There is very little doubt that a deliber- 




The effect of one of the bombs dropped from a Zeppelin 
on Antwerp. 

"The steel splinters tore their way through the thick brick walls as easily as a 
lead-pencil is jabbed through a sheet of paper." 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR 57 

ate attempt was made to kill the royal family, 
the General Staff, and the members of the 
Government, one shell bursting within a hun- 
dred yards of the royal palace, where the King 
and Queen were sleeping, and another within 
two hundred yards of staff headquarters and 
the Hotel St. Antoine. 

As a result of this night of horror, Antwerp, 
to use an inelegant but descriptive expression, 
developed a violent case of the jimjams. The 
next night and every night thereafter until the 
Germans came in and took the city, she thought 
she saw things; not green rats and pink snakes, 
but large, sausage-shaped balloons with bombs 
dropping from them. The military author- 
ities — for the city was under martial law — 
screwed down the lid so tight that even the 
most rabid prohibitionists and social reformers 
murmured. As a re^trlt of the precautionary 
measures which were taken, Antwerp, with its 
four hundred thousand inhabitants, became 
about as cheerful a place of residence as a 
country cemetery on a rainy evening. At eight 
o'clock every street light was turned off, every 
shop and restaurant and cafe closed, every 
window darkened. If a light was seen in a 



58 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

window after eight o'clock the person who 
occupied that room was in grave danger of 
being arrested for signalHng to the enemy. 
My room, which was on the third floor of the 
hotel, was so situated that its windows could 
not be seen from the street, and hence I was 
not as particular about lowering the shades 
as I should have been. The second night 
after the Zeppelin raid the manager came 
bursting into my room. "Quick, Mr. Powell," 
he called excitedly, "pull down your shade. 
The observers in the cathedral tower have just 
sent word that your windows are lighted and 
the police are down-stairs to find out what it 



means." 



The darkness of London and Paris was a 
joke beside the darkness of Antwerp. It was 
so dark in the narrow, winding streets, bordered 
by ancient houses, that when, as was my 
custom, I went to the telegraph office with 
my despatches after dinner, I had to feel my 
way with a cane, like a blind man. To make 
conditions more intolerable, if such a thing 
were possible, cordons of sentries were thrown 
around those buildings under whose roofs the 
members of the Government slept, so that if 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR 59 

one returned after nightfall he was greeted by 
a harsh command to halt, and a sentry held a 
rifle muzzle against his breast while another 
sentry, by means of a dark lantern, scrutinized 
his papers. Save for the sentries, the streets 
were deserted, for, as the places of amusement 
and the eating places and drinking places were 
closed, there was no place for the people to go 
except to bed. I was reminded of the man 
who told his wife that he came home because 
all the other places were closed. 

I have heard it said that Antwerp was 
indifferent to its fate, but it made no such 
impression on me. Never have I lived in such 
an atmosphere of depression and gloom. Except 
around the St. Antoine at the lunch and 
dinner hours and in the cafes just before 
nightfall did one see anything which was even 
a second cousin to jollity. The people did not 
smile. They went about with grave and 
anxious faces. In fact, outside of the places 
I have mentioned, one rarely heard a laugh. 
The people who sat at the round iron tables 
on the sidewalks in front of the cafes drinking 
their light wines and beer — no spirits were 
permitted to be sold — sat in silence and with 



6o FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

solemn faces. God knows, there was little 
enough for them to smile about. Their nation 
was being slowly strangled. Three quarters 
of its soil was under the heel of the invader. 
An alien flag, a hated flag, flew over their 
capital. Their King and their Government 
were fugitives, moving from place to place as 
a vagrant moves on at the approach of a 
policeman. Men who, a month before, were 
prosperous shopkeepers and tradesmen were 
virtual bankrupts, not knowing where the next 
hundred-franc note was coming from. Other 
men had seen their little flower-surrounded 
homes in the suburbs razed to the ground that 
an approaching enemy might find no cover. 
Though the shops were open, they had no 
customers, for the people had no money, or, 
if they had money, they were hoarding it 
against the days when they might be homeless 
fugitives. No, there was not very much to 
smile about in Antwerp. 

There were amusing incidents, of course. 
If one recognizes humor when he sees it he 
can find it in almost any situation. After the 
first Zeppelin attack the management of the 
St. Antoine fitted up bedrooms in the cellars. 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR 6r 

A century or more ago the St. Antoine was 
not a hotel but a monastery, and its cellars 
are all that the cellars of a monastery ought to 
be— thick-walled and damp and musty. Yet 
these subterranean suites were in as great 
demand among the diplomatists as are tables 
in the palm room of the Savoy during the 
season. From my bedroom window, which 
overlooked the court, I could see apprehensive 
guests cautiously emerging from their cellar 
chambers in the early morning. It reminded 
me of woodchucks coming out of their holes. 

As the siege progressed and the German 
guns were pushed nearer to the city, those who 
lived in what might be termed "conspicuous" 
localities began to seek other quarters. 

"I'm going to change hotels to-day," I 
heard a man remark to a friend. 

"Why?" inquired the other. 

"Because I am within thirty yards of the 
cathedral," was the answer. The towering 
spire of the famous cathedral is, you must 
understand, the most conspicuous thing in 
Antwerp — on clear days you can see it from 
twenty miles away — and to live in its imme- 
diate vicinity during a bombardment of the 



62 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

city was equivalent to taking shelter under the 
only tree in a field during a heavy thunder- 
storm. 

Two days before the bombardment began 
there was a meeting of the American residents 
— such of them as still remained in the city — 
at the leading club. About a dozen of us in 
all sat down to dinner. The purpose of the 
gathering was to discuss the attitude which 
the Americans should adopt towards the 
German officers, for it was known that the fall 
of the city was imminent. I remember that 
the sense of the meeting was that we should 
treat the helmeted intruders with frigid polite- 
ness — I think that was the term — ^which, trans- 
lated, meant that we were not to buy them 
drinks or offer them cigars. Of the twelve of us 
who sat around the table that night, there are 
only two — Mr. Manly Whedbee and myself— who 
remained to witness the German occupation. 

That the precautions taken against Zeppelins 
were by no means overdone was proved by the 
total failure of the second aerial raid on Ant- 
werp, in the latter part of September, when 
a dirigible again sailed over the city under 
cover of the darkness. Owing to the total 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR 63 

absence of street lights, however, the dirigible's 
crew were evidently unable to get their bear- 
ings, for the half dozen bombs that they 
discharged fell in the outskirts of the city 
without causing any loss of life or doing any 
serious damage. This time, moreover, the 
Belgians were quite prepared — the fire of their 
*'sky artillery," guided by search-hghts, mak- 
ing things exceedingly uncomfortable for the 
Germans. 

I have heard it stated by Belgian officers and 
others that the bombs were dropped from the 
dirigibles by an ingenious arrangement which 
made the air-ship itself comparatively safe from 
harm and at the same time rendered the aim 
of its bombman much more accurate. Accord- 
ing to them, the dirigible comes to a stop — or 
as near a stop as possible — above the city or 
fortification which it wishes to attack, at a 
height out of range of either artillery or rifle 
fire. Then, by means of a steel cable a thou- 
sand feet or more in length, it lowers a small 
wire cage just large enough to contain a man 
and a supply of bombs, this cage being suffi- 
ciently armored so that it is proof against 
rifle-bullets. At the same time it affords so 



64 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

tiny a mark that the chances of its being hit 
by artillery fire are insignificant. If it should 
be struck, moreover, the air-ship itself would 
still be unharmed and only one man would be 
lost, and when he fell his supply of bombs 
would fall with him. The Zeppelin, pre- 
sumably equipped with at least two cages and 
cables, might at once lower another bomb- 
thrower. I do not pretend to say whether 
this ingenious contrivance is used by the 
Germans. Certainly the Zeppelin which I 
saw in action had nothing of the kind, nor did 
it drop its projectiles promiscuously, as one 
would drop a stone, but apparently discharged 
them from a bomb tube. 

Though the Zeppelin raids proved wholly 
ineffective, so far as their effect on troops and 
fortifications were concerned, the German 
aviators introduced some novel tricks in aerial 
warfare which were as practical as they were 
ingenious. During the battle of Vilvorde, 
for example, and throughout the attacks on 
the Antwerp forts, German dirigibles hovered 
at a safe height over the Belgian positions and 
directed the fire of the German gunners with 
remarkable success. The aerial observers 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR 65 

watched, through powerful glasses, the effect 
of the German shells and then, by means of a 
large disk which was swung at the end of a 
line and could be raised or lowered at will, 
signalled as need be in code "higher — lower — 
right — left" and thus guided the gunners — 
who were, of course, unable to see their mark 
or the effect of their fire — until almost every 
shot was a hit. At Vilvorde, as a result of this 
aerial fire-control system, I saw the German 
artillery, posted out of sight behind a railway 
embankment, get the range of a retreating 
column of Belgian infantry and with a dozen 
well-placed shots practically wipe it out of 
existence. So perfect was the German system 
of observation and fire control during the 
final attack on the Antwerp defences that 
whenever the Belgians or British moved a 
regiment or a battery the aerial observers 
instantly detected it and a perfect storm of 
shells was directed against the new position. 

Throughout the operations around Antwerp, 
the Taubes, as the German aeroplanes are 
called because of their fancied resemblance to 
a dove, repeatedly performed daring feats of 
reconnoissance. On one occasion, while I was 



(£ FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

with the General Staff at Lierre, one of these 
German Taubes sailed directly over the Hotel 
de Ville, which was being used as staff head- 
quarters. It so happened that King Albert 
was standing in the street, smoking one of the 
seven-for-a-franc Belgian cigars to which he 
was partial. 

"The Germans call it a dove, eh ?" remarked 
the King, as he looked up at the passing aircraft. 
"Well, it looks to me more like a hawk." 

A few days before the fall of Antwerp a Taube 
flew directly over the city in the early afternoon, 
dropping thousands of proclamations printed 
in both French and Flemish and signed by the 
commander of the investing forces, pointing out 
to the inhabitants the futility of resistance, 
asserting that in fighting Germany they were 
playing Russia's game, and urging them to lay 
down their arms. The aeroplane was greeted by 
a storm of shrapnel from the high-angle guns 
mounted on the fortifications, the only effect of 
which, however, was to kill two unoffending 
citizens who were standing in the streets and 
were struck by the fragments of the falling shells. 

Most people seem to have the impression 
that it is as easy for an aviator to see what is 




.S 

o 



U 



00 <u 

3 13 



60 



pq 



bo 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR e^ 

happening on the ground beneath him as 
though he were looking down from the roof of 
a high building. Under ordinary conditions, 
when one can skim above the surface of the 
earth at a height of a few hundred feet, this is 
quite true, but it is quite a different matter 
when one is flying above hostile troops who are 
blazing away at him with rifles and machine 
guns. During reconnoissance work the airmen 
generally are compelled to ascend to an altitude 
of a mile or a mile and a quarter, which makes 
observation extremely difficult, as small objects, 
even with the aid of the strongest glasses, 
assume unfamiliar shapes and become fore- 
shortened. If, in order to obtain a better 
view, they venture to fly at a lower height, 
they are likely to be greeted by a hail of rifle 
fire from soldiers in the trenches. The Belgian 
aviators with whom I talked assured me that 
they feared rifle fire more than bursting 
shrapnel, as the fire of a regiment, when con- 
centrated even on so elusive an object as an 
aeroplane, proves far more deadly than shells. 

The Belgians made more use than any other 
nation of motor-cars. When war was declared 



68 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

one of the first steps taken by the miHtary 
authorities was to commandeer every motor- 
car, every motor-cycle, and every litre of petrol 
in the kingdom. As a result they depended 
almost entirely upon motor-driven vehicles 
for their military transport, which was, I might 
add, extremely efficient. In fact, we could 
always tell when we were approaching the front 
by the amazing number of motor-cars which 
lined the roads for miles in the rear of each 
division. 

Anything that had four wheels and a motor 
to drive them — diminutive American run- 
abouts, slim, low-hung racing cars, luxurious 
limousines with coronets painted on the panels, 
delivery cars bearing the names of shops in 
Antwerp and Ghent and Brussels, lumbering 
motor-trucks, hotel omnibuses — all met the 
same fate, which consisted in being daubed with 
elephant-gray paint, labelled "S.M." (Service 
Militaire) in staring white letters, and started 
for the front, usually in charge of a wholly 
inexperienced driver. It made an automobile 
lover groan to see the way some of those cars 
were treated. But they did the business. 
They averaged something like twelve miles an 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR 69 

hour — which is remarkable time for army- 
transport — and, strangely enough, very few of 
them broke down. If they did there was 
always an automobile des reparations promptly 
on hand to repair the damage. Before the 
war began the Belgian army had no army trans- 
port worthy of the name; before the forts at 
Liege had been silenced it had as efficient a one 
as any nation in Europe. 

The headquarters of the motor-car branch 
of the army was at the Pare des Automobiles 
Mihtaires, on the Red Star quays in Antwerp. 
Here several hundred cars were always kept 
in reserve, and here was collected an enormous 
store of automobile supplies and sundries. 
The scene under the long, low sheds, with their 
corrugated-iron roofs, always reminded me of 
the Automobile Show in Madison Square 
Garden. After a car had once been placed 
at your disposal by the Government, getting 
supplies for it was merely a question of signing 
hons. Obtaining extra equipment for my 
car was Roos's chief amusement. Tires, tools, 
spare parts, horns, lamps, trunks — all you had 
to do was to scrawl your name at the foot of a 
printed form and they were promptly handed 



70 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

over. When I first went to Belgium I was 
given a sixty-horse-power touring-car, and 
when the weather turned unpleasant I asked 
for and was given a limousine that was big 
enough to sleep in, and when I found this too 
clumsy, Comte de Gruen, the commandant of 
the Pare des Automobiles, obligingly exchanged 
it for a ninety-horse-power berline. They were 
most accommodating, those Belgians. I am 
sorry to say that my berline, which was the 
envy of every one in Antwerp, was eventually 
captured by the Germans. 

Though both the French and the Germans 
had for a number of years been experimenting 
with armored cars of various patterns, the 
Belgians, who had never before given the 
subject serious consideration, were the first 
to evolve and to send into action a really 
practical vehicle of this description. The 
earlier armored cars used by the Belgians 
were built at the great Minerva factory in 
Antwerp and consisted of a circular turret, 
high enough so that only the head and shoulders 
of the man operating the machine gun were 
exposed, covered with half-inch steel plates 
and mounted on an ordinary chassis. After 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR 71 

the disastrous affair near Herenthals, in which 
Prince Henri de Ligne was mortally wounded 
while engaged in a raid into the German lines 
for the purpose of blowing up bridges, it was 
seen that the crew of the automitrailleuses, as 
the armored cars were called, was insufficiently 
protected, and, to remedy this, a movable 
steel dome, with an opening for the muzzle 
of the machine gun, was superimposed on the 
turret. These grim vehicles, which jeered at 
bullets, and were proof even against shrapnel, 
quickly became a nightmare to the Germans. 
Driven by the most reckless racing drivers in 
Belgium, manned by crews of dare-devil 
youngsters, and armed with machine guns 
which poured out lead at the rate of a thousand 
shots a minute, these wheeled fortresses would 
tear at will into the German lines, cut up an 
outpost or wipe out a cavalry patrol, dynamite 
a bridge or a tunnel or a culvert, and be back 
in the Belgian lines again almost before the 
enemy realized what had happened. 

I myself witnessed an example of the cool 
'daring of these mitrailleuse drivers during the 
fighting around Malines. I was standing on a 
railway embankment watching the withdrawal 



72 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

under heavy fire of the last Belgian troops, 
when an armored car, the lean muzzle of its 
machine gun peering from its turret, tore past 
me at fifty miles an hour, spitting a murderous 
spray of lead as it bore down on the advancing 
Germans. But when within a few hundred 
yards of the German line the car slackened 
speed and stopped. Its petrol was exhausted. 
Instantly one of the crew was out in the road 
and, under cover of the fire from the machine 
gun, began to refill the tank. Though bullets 
were kicking up spurts of dust in the road or 
ping-pinging against the steel turret he would 
not be hurried. I, who was watching the 
scene through my field-glasses, was much more 
excited than he was. Then, when the tank 
was filled, the car refused to back ! It was a 
big machine and the narrow road was bordered 
on either side by deep ditches, but by a 
miracle the driver was able — and just able — 
to turn the car round. Though by this time 
the German gunners had the range and shrapnel 
was bursting all about him, he was as cool as 
though he were turning a limousine in the 
width of Riverside Drive. As the car straight- 
ened out for its retreat, the Belgians gave 




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THE DEATH IN THE AIR 73 

the Germans a jeering screech from their horn 
and a parting blast of lead from their machine 
gun and went racing Antwerpwards. 

It is, by the way, a curious and interesting 
fact that the machine gun used in both the 
Belgian and German armored cars, and which 
is one of the most effective weapons produced 
by the war, was repeatedly oflFered to the 
American War Department by its inventor, 
Major Isaac Newton Lewis, of the United 
States army, and was as repeatedly rejected 
by the officials at Washington. At last, in 
despair of receiving recognition in his own 
country, he sold it to Germany and Belgium. 
The Lewis gun, which is air-cooled and weighs 
only twenty-nine pounds — less than half the 
weight of a soldier's equipment — fires a thou- 
sand shots a minute. In the fighting around 
Sempst I saw trees as large round as a man's 
thigh literally cut down by the stream of 
lead from these weapons. All of which but 
proves the truth of the Biblical assertion that 
"a prophet is not without honor save in his 
own country." 

The inventor of the Lewis gun was not the 
only American who played an inconspicuous 



74 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

but none the less important part in the War 
of Nations. A certain American corporation 
doing business in Belgium placed its huge 
Antwerp plant and the services of its corps of 
skilled engineers at the service of the Govern- 
ment, though I might add that this fact was 
kept carefully concealed, being known to only 
a handful of the higher Belgian officials. This 
concern made shells and other ammunition for 
the Belgian army; it furnished aeroplanes and 
machine guns; it constructed miles of barbed- 
wire entanglements and connected those en- 
tanglements with the city lighting system; 
one of its officers went on a secret mission to 
England and brought back with him a supply 
of cordite, not to mention six large-calibre 
guns which he smuggled through Dutch 
territorial waters hidden in the steamer's coal 
bunkers. And, as though all this were not 
enough, the Belgian Government confided to 
this foreign corporation the minting of the na- 
tional currency. For obvious reasons I am not 
at liberty to mention the name of this concern, 
though it is known to practically every person 
in the United States, each month checks being 
sent to the parent concern by eight hundred 



THE DEATH IN THE AIR 75 

thousand people in New York alone. Inci- 
dentally it publishes the most widely read 
volume in the world. I wish that I might 
tell you the name of this concern. Upon 
second thought, I think I will. It is the 
Bell Telephone Company. 



IV 
UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 

WHEN, upon the approach of the Ger- 
mans to Brussels, the Government 
and the members of the diplomatic 
corps fled to Antwerp, the American Minister, 
Mr. Brand Whitlock, did not accompany them. 
In view of the peculiar position occupied by the 
United States as the only Great Power not in- 
volved in hostilities, he felt, and, as it proved, 
quite rightly, that he could be of more service 
to Belgium and to Brussels and to the cause 
of humanity in general by remaining behind. 
There remained with him the secretary of le- 
gation, Mr. Hugh S. Gibson. Mr. Whitlock's 
reasons for remaining in Brussels were two- 
fold. In the first place, there were a large num- 
ber of English and Americans, both residents 
and tourists, who had been either unable or un- 
willing to leave the city, and who, he felt, were 
entitled to diplomatic protection. Secondly, 
the behavior of the German troops in other 

Belgian cities had aroused grave fears of what 

76 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE ^^ 

would happen when they entered Brussels, and 
it was generally felt that the presence of the 
American Minister might deter them from com- 
mitting the excesses and outrages which up to 
that time had characterized their advance. It 
was no secret that Germany was desperately 
anxious to curry favor with the United States, 
and it was scarcely likely, therefore, that houses 
would be sacked and burnt, civilians executed, 
and women violated under the disapproving 
eyes of the American representative. This 
surmise proved to be well founded. The 
Germans did not want Mr. Whitlock in 
Brussels, and nothing would have pleased them 
better than to have had him depart and leave 
them to their own devices, but, so long as he 
blandly ignored their hints that his room was 
preferable to his company and persisted in 
sitting tight, they submitted to his surveillance 
with the best grace possible and behaved them- 
selves as punctiliously as a dog that has been 
permitted to come into a parlor. After the 
civil administration had been established, how- 
ever, and Belgium had become, in theory at 
least, a German province, Mr. Whitlock was 
told quite plainly that the kingdom to which he 



78 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

was accredited had ceased to exist as an in- 
dependent nation, and that Anglo-American 
affairs in Belgium could henceforward be in- 
trusted to the American Ambassador at Ber- 
lin. But Mr. Whitlock, who had received his 
training in shirt-sleeve diplomacy as Socialist 
Mayor of Toledo, Ohio, was as impervious to 
German suggestions as he had been to the 
threats and pleadings of party politicians, and 
told Baron von der Goltz, the German Governor, 
politely but quite firmly, that he did not take 
his orders from Berlin but from Washington. 
"Gott in Himmel!" exclaimed the Germans, 
shrugging their shoulders despairingly, "what 
is to be done with such a man .?" 

Before the Germans had been in occupation 
of Brussels a fortnight the question of food for 
the poorer classes became a serious and pressing 
problem. The German armies, in their onset 
toward the west, had swept the Belgian coun- 
tryside bare; the products of the farms and 
gardens in the immediate vicinity of the city 
had been commandeered for the use of the 
garrison, and the spectre of starvation was al- 
ready beginning to cast its dread shadow over 
Brussels. Mr. Whitlock acted with prompt- 










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UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 79 

ness and decision. He sent Americans who 
had volunteered their services to Holland to 
purchase foodstuffs, and at the same time 
informed the German commander that he ex- 
pected these foodstuffs to be admitted with- 
out hindrance. The German replied that he 
could not comply with this request without 
first communicating with his Imperial master, 
whereupon he was told, in effect, that the 
American Government would consider him 
personally responsible if the foodstuffs were 
delayed or diverted for military use and a 
famine ensued in consequence. The firmness of 
Mr. Whitlock's attitude had its effect, for at 
seven o'clock the next morning he received word 
that his wishes would be complied with. 

As a result of the German occupation, 
Brussels, with its six hundred thousand inhabi- 
tants, was as completely cut off from communi- 
cation with the outside world as though it 
were on an island in the South Pacific. The 
postal, telegraph and telephone services were 
suspended; the railways were blocked with 
troop trains moving westward; the roads were 
filled from ditch to ditch with troops and trans- 
port wagons; and so tightly were the lines 



8o FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

drawn between that portion of Belgium 
occupied by the Germans and that still held 
by the Belgians, that those daring souls who 
attempted to slip through the cordons of 
sentries did so at peril of their lives. It 
sounds almost incredible that a great city 
could be so effectually isolated, yet so it was. 
Even the Cabinet Ministers and other officials 
who had accompanied the Government in its 
flight to Antwerp were unable to learn what 
had befallen the families which they had in 
many cases left behind them. After nearly 
three weeks had passed without word from the 
American Legation, the Department of State 
cabled the American Consul-General at Antwerp 
that some means of communicating with Mr. 
Whitlock must be found. Happening to be 
in the Consulate when the message was received, 
I placed my services and my car at the disposal 
of the Consul-General, who promptly accepted 
them. Upon learning of my proposed jaunt 
into the enemy's lines, a friend, Mr. M. Manly 
Whedbee, the director of the Belgian branch 
of the British-American Tobacco Company, 
offered to accompany me, and as he is as cool- 
headed and courageous and companionable as 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 8i 

any one I know, and as he knew as much about 
driving the car as I did — for it was obviously 
impossible to take my Belgian driver — I was 
only too glad to have him along. It was, in- 
deed, due to Mr. Whedbee's foresight in 
taking along a huge quantity of cigarettes for 
distribution among the soldiers, that we were 
able to escape from Brussels. But more of that 
episode hereafter. 

When the Consul-General asked General 
Dufour, the military Governor of Antwerp, to 
issue us a safe conduct through the Belgian 
lines, that gruff old soldier at first refused flatly, 
asserting that, as the German outposts had been 
firing on cars bearing the Red Cross flag, there 
was no assurance that they would respect one 
bearing the Stars and Stripes. The urgency 
of the matter being explained to him, however, 
he reluctantly issued the necessary laissez- 
passer, though intimating quite plainly that our 
mission would probably end in providing "more 
work for the undertaker, another little job 
for the casket-maker," and that he washed his 
hands of all responsibility for our fate. But by 
two American flags mounted on the wind-shield, 
and the explanatory legends *' Service Consu" 



82 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

laire des Etats-Unis d' Amerique'" and *' Ameri-- 
kanischer Consulardienst" painted in staring 
letters on the hood, we hoped, however, to make 
it quite clear to Germans and Belgians alike 
that we were protected by the international 
game-laws so far as shooting us was concerned. 

Now, the disappointing thing about our trip 
was that we didn't encounter any Uhlans. 
Every one had warned us so repeatedly about 
Uhlans that we fully expected to find them, 
with their pennoned lances and their square- 
topped schapkas, lurking behind every hedge, 
and when they did not come spurring out to 
intercept us we were greatly disappointed. 
It was Hke making a journey to the polar regions 
and seeing no Esquimaux. The smart young 
cavalry officer who bade us good-by at the 
Belgian outposts, warned us to keep our eyes 
open for them and said, rather mournfully, I 
thought, that he only hoped they would give 
us time to explain who we were before they 
opened fire on us. "They are such hasty 
fellows, these Uhlans," said he, "always shoot- 
ing first and making inquiries afterward." 
As a matter of fact, the only Uhlan we saw on 
the entire trip was riding about Brussels in a 




Belgian peasant displaying the charred foot of a fifteen-year- 
old girl who was killed in the fighting at Melle. 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 83 

cab, smoking a large porcelain pipe and with 
his spurred boots resting comfortably on the 
cushions. 

Though we crept along as circumspectly as 
a motorist who knows that he is being trailed 
by a motor-cycle policeman, peering behind 
farmhouses and hedges and into the depths of 
thickets and expecting any moment to hear a 
grufF command, emphasized by the bang of a 
carbine, it was not until we were at the very 
outskirts of Aerschot that we encountered the 
Germans. There were a hundred of them so 
cleverly ambushed behind a hedge that we 
would never have suspected their presence had 
we not caught the glint of sunlight on their 
rifle barrels. We should not have gotten much 
nearer, in any event, for they had a wire neatly 
strung across the road at just the right height 
to take us under the chins. When we were 
within a hundred yards of the hedge an officer 
in a trailing gray cloak stepped into the middle 
of the road and held up his hand. 

''Halt!'' 

I jammed on the brakes so suddenly that we 
nearly went through the wind-shield. 

"Get out of the automobile and stand well 



\ y 



84 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

away from it," the officer commanded in 
German. We got out very promptly. 

"One of you advance alone, with his hands up." 

I advanced alone, but not with my hands 
up. It is such an undignified position. I had 
that shivery feeling chasing up and down my 
spine which came from knowing that I was 
covered by a hundred rifles, and that if I made 
a move which seemed suspicious to the men 
behind those rifles, they would instantly trans- 
form me into a sieve. 

"Are you English?" the officer demanded, 
none too pleasantly. 

"No, American," said L 

"Oh, that's all right," said he, his manner 
instantly thawing. "I know America well," 
he continued, "Atlantic City and Asbury 
Park and Niagara Falls and Coney Island. I 
have seen all of your famous places." 

Imagine, if you please, standing in the middle 
of a Belgian highway, surrounded by German 
soldiers who looked as though they would rather 
shoot you than not, discussing the relative 
merits of the hotels at Atlantic City, and which 
had the best dining-car service, the Pennsyl- 
vania or the New York Central ! 




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UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 85 

I learned from the officer, who proved to be 
an exceedingly agreeable fellow, that had we 
advanced ten feet further after the command 
to halt was given, we should probably have 
been planted in graves dug in a near-by potato 
field, as only an hour before our arrival a 
Belgian mitrailleuse car had torn down the road 
with its machine gun squirting a stream of 
lead, and had smashed straight through the 
German line, killing three men and wounding 
a dozen others. They were burying them 
when we appeared. When our big gray ma- 
chine hove in sight they not unnaturally took us 
for another armored car and prepared to give 
us a warm reception. It was a lucky thing for 
us that our brakes worked quickly. 

We were the first foreigners to see Aerschot, 
or rather what was left of Aerschot since it 
had been sacked and burned by the Germans. 
A few days before Aerschot had been a pros- 
perous and happy town of ten thousand people. 
When we saw it it was but a heap of smoking 
ruins, garrisoned by a battalion of German 
soldiers, and with its population consisting of 
half a hundred white-faced women. In many 
parts of the world I have seen many terrible 



S6 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

and revolting things, but nothing so ghastly, 
so horrifying as Aerschot. Quite two-thirds of 
the houses had been burned and showed un- 
mistakable signs of having been sacked by 
a maddened soldiery before they were burned. 
Everywhere were the ghastly evidences. Doors 
had been smashed in with rifle-butts and boot- 
heels; windows had been broken; furniture had 
been wantonly destroyed; pictures had been 
torn from the walls; mattresses had been ripped 
open with bayonets in search of valuables; 
drawers had been emptied upon the floors; 
the outer walls of the houses were spattered 
with blood and pock-marked with bullets; the 
sidewalks were slippery with broken wine- 
bottles; the streets were strewn with women's 
clothing. It needed no one to tell us the 
details of that orgy of blood and lust. The 
story was so plainly written that any one could 
read it. 

For a mile we drove the car slowly between 
the blackened walls of fire-gutted buildings. 
This was no accidental conflagration, mind you, 
for scattered here and there were houses which 
stood undamaged and in every such case there 
was scrawled with chalk upon their doors 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 87 

"Gute leute. Nicht zu hrennen. Nicht zu pliln- 
dern" (Good people. Do not burn. Do not 
plunder.) 

The Germans went about the work of house- 
burning as systematically as they did every- 
thing else. They had various devices for 
starting conflagrations, all of them effective. 
At Aerschot and Louvain they broke the 
windows of the houses and threw in sticks 
which had been soaked in oil and dipped in 
sulphur. Elsewhere they used tiny black 
tablets, about the size of cough lozenges, made 
of some highly inflammable composition, to 
which they touched a match. At Termonde, 
which they destroyed in spite of the fact that 
the inhabitants had evacuated the city before 
their arrival, they used a motor-car equipped 
with a large tank for petrol, a pump, a hose, 
and a spraying-nozzle. The car was run 
slowly through the streets, one soldier working 
the pump and another spraying the fronts of 
the houses. Then they set fire to them. Oh, 
yes, they were very methodical about it all, 
those Germans. 

Despite the scowls of the soldiers, I at- 
tempted to talk with some of the women hud- 



88 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

died in front of a bakery waiting for a dis- 
tribution of bread, but the poor creatures 
were too terror-stricken to do more than stare 
at us with wide, beseeching eyes. Those eyes 
will always haunt me. I wonder if they do not 
sometimes haunt the Germans. But a little 
episode that occurred as we were leaving the 
city did more than anything else to bring home 
the horror of it all. We passed a little girl of 
nine or ten and I stopped the car to ask the 
way. Instantly she held both hands above her 
head and began to scream for mercy. When 
we had given her some chocolate and money, 
and had assured her that we were not Germans, 
but Americans and friends, she ran like a 
frightened deer. That little child, with her 
fright-wide eyes and her hands raised in sup- 
plication, was in herself a terrible indictment of 
the Germans. 

There are, as might be expected, two versions 
of the happenings which precipitated that 
night of horrors in Aerschot. The German 
version — I had it from the German com- 
mander himself — is to the effect that after 
the German troops had entered Aerschot, the 
Chief of Staff and some of the officers were 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 89 

asked to dinner by the burgomaster. While 
they were seated at the table the son of the 
burgomaster, a boy of fifteen, entered the room 
with a revolver and killed the Chief of Staff, 
whereupon, as though at a prearranged signal, 
the townspeople opened fire from their windows 
upon the troops. What followed — the execu- 
tion of the burgomaster, his son, and several 
score of the leading townsmen, the giving over 
of the women to a lust-mad soldiery, the sack- 
ing of the houses, and the final burning of the 
town — ^was the punishment which would always 
be meted out to towns whose inhabitants at- 
tacked German soldiers. 

Now, up to a certain point the Belgian 
version agrees with the German. It is ad- 
mitted that the Germans entered the town 
peaceably enough, that the German Chief of 
Staff and other officers accepted the hospitality 
of the burgomaster, and that, while they were 
at dinner, the burgomaster's son entered the 
room and shot the Chief of Staff dead with a 
revolver. But — and this is the point to which 
the German story makes no allusion — the boy 
killed the Chief of Staff in defence of his sister s 
honor. It is claimed that toward the end of 



90 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

the meal the German officer, inflamed with 
wine, informed the burgomaster that he in- 
tended to pass the night with his young 
and beautiful daughter, whereupon the girl's 
brother quietly sHpped from the room and, 
returning a moment later, put a sudden end 
to the German's career with an automatic. 
What the real truth is I do not know. Perhaps 
no one knows. The Germans did not leave 
many eye-witnesses to tell the story of what 
happened. Piecing together the stories told 
by those who did survive that night of horror, 
we know that scores of the townspeople were 
shot down in cold blood and that, when the 
firing squads could not do the work of slaughter 
fast enough, the victims were lined up and a 
machine gun was turned upon them. We 
know that young girls were dragged from their 
homes and stripped naked and violated by 
soldiers — many soldiers — in the public square 
in the presence of officers. We know that both 
men and women were unspeakably mutilated, 
that children were bayoneted, that dwellings 
were ransacked and looted, and that finally, 
as though to destroy the evidences of their 
horrid work, soldiers went from house to 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 91 

house with torches, methodically setting fire 
to them. 

It was with a feeling of repulsion amounting 
almost to nausea that we left what had once 
been Aerschot behind us. The road leading to 
Louvain was alive with soldiery, and we were 
halted every few minutes by German patrols. 
Had not the commanding officer in Aerschot 
detailed two bicylists to accompany us I 
doubt if we should have gotten through. 
Whedbee had had the happy idea of bringing 
along a thousand packets of cigarettes — the 
tonneau of the car was literally filled with them 
— and we tossed a packet to every German 
soldier that we saw. You could have followed 
our trail for thirty miles by the cigarettes we 
left behind us. As it turned out, they were 
the means of saving us from being detained 
within the German lines. From the windows 
of the plundered and fire-blackened houses 
which lined the road from Aerschot to Louvain 
still hung white flags made from sheets and 
table-cloths and pillow-cases — pathetic appeals 
for the mercy which was not granted. 

Thanks to our American flags, to the nature 
of our mission, and to our wholesale distribu- 



92 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

tion of cigarettes, we were passed from 
outpost to outpost and from regimental 
headquarters to regimental headquarters until 
we reached Louvain. Here we came upon 
another scene of destruction and desolation. 
Nearly half the city was in ashes. Most of the 
principal streets were impassable from fallen 
masonry. The splendid avenues and boule- 
vards were lined on either side by the charred 
skeletons of what had once been handsome 
buildings. The fronts of many of the houses 
were smeared with crimson stains. In com- 
parison to its size, the Germans had wrought 
more wide-spread destruction in Louvain than 
did the earthquake and fire combined in San 
Francisco. The looting had evidently been 
unrestrained. The roads for miles in either 
direction were littered with furniture and 
bedding and clothing. Such articles as the 
soldiers could not carry away they wantonly 
destroyed. Hangings had been torn down, 
pictures on the walls had been smashed, the 
contents of drawers and trunks had been 
emptied into the streets, literally everything 
breakable had been broken. This is not from 
hearsay, remember; I saw it with my own eyes. 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 93 

And the amazing feature of it all was that 
among the Germans there seemed to be no 
feeling of regret, no sense of shame. Officers 
in immaculate uniforms strolled about among 
the ruins, chatting and laughing and smoking. 
At one place a magnificent mahogany dining- 
table had been dragged into the middle of the 
road and about it, sprawled in carved and 
tapestry-covered chairs, a dozen German 
infantrymen were drinking beer. 

Just as there are two versions of the destruc- 
tion of Aerschot, so there are two versions, 
though in this case widely different, of the 
events which led up to the destruction of 
Louvain. It should be borne in mind, to 
begin with, that Louvain was not destroyed 
by bombardment or in the heat of battle, for 
the Germans had entered it unopposed, and 
had been in undisputed possession for several 
days. The Germans assert that a conspiracy, 
fomented by the burgomaster, the priests and 
many of the leading citizens, existed among 
the townspeople, who planned to suddenly fall 
upon and exterminate the garrison. They 
claim that, in pursuance of this plan, on the 
night of August 26, the inhabitants opened a 



94 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

murderous fire upon the unsuspecting troops 
from housetops, doors and windows; that a 
fierce street battle ensued, in which a number 
of women and children were unfortunately 
killed by stray bullets; and that, in retaliation 
for this act of treachery, a number of the 
inhabitants were executed and a portion of the 
city was burned. Notwithstanding the fact 
that, as soon as the Germans entered the city, 
they searched it thoroughly for concealed 
weapons, they claim that the townspeople were 
not only well supplied with rifles and ammuni- 
tion, but that they even opened on them from 
their windows with machine guns. Though 
it seems scarcely probable that the inhabitants 
of Louvain would attempt so mad an enterprise 
as to attack an overwhelming force of Germans 
— particularly with the terrible lesson of 
Aerschot still fresh in their minds — I do not 
care to express any opinion as to the truth of 
the German assertions. 

The Belgians tell quite a different story. 
They say that, as the result of a successful 
Belgian oflFensive movement to the south of 
Malines, the German troops retreated in some- 
thing closely akin to panic, one division falling 






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UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 95 

back, after nightfall, upon Louvain. In the 
inky blackness the garrison, mistaking the 
approaching troops for Belgians, opened a 
deadly fire upon them. When the mistake was 
discovered the Germans, partly in order to 
cover up their disastrous blunder and partly to 
vent their rage and chagrin, turned upon the 
townspeople in a paroxysm of fury. A scene of 
indescribable terror ensued, the soldiers, who 
had broken into the wine-shops and drunk 
themselves into a state of frenzy, practically 
running amuck, breaking in doors and shooting 
at every one they saw. That some of the 
citizens snatched up such weapons as came 
to hand and defended their homes and their 
women no one attempts to deny — but this 
scattered and pitifully ineffectual resistance 
gave the Germans the very excuse they were 
seeking. The citizens had attacked them and 
they would teach the citizens, both of Louvain 
and of other cities which they might enter, a 
lasting lesson. They did. No Belgian will ever 
forget — or forgive — that lesson. The orgy of 
blood and lust and destruction lasted for two 
days. Several American correspondents, among 
them Mr. Richard Harding Davis, who were 



96 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

being taken by train from Brussels to Germany, 
and who were held for some hours in the station 
at Louvain during the first night's massacre, 
have vividly described the horrors which they 
witnessed from their car window. On the 
second day, Mr. Hugh S. Gibson, secretary of 
the American Legation in Brussels, accompanied 
by the Swedish and Mexican charges, drove 
over to Louvain in a taxicab. Mr. Gibson told 
me that the Germans had dragged chairs and 
a dining-table from a nearby house into the 
middle of the square in front of the station and 
that some officers, already considerably the 
worse for drink, insisted that the three diplo- 
matists join them in a bottle of wine. And this 
while the city was burning and rifles were 
cracking, and the dead bodies of men and women 
lay sprawled in the streets 1 

If Belgium wishes to keep alive in the minds 
of her people the recollection of German mili- 
tary barbarism, if she desires to inculcate the 
coming generations with the horrors and 
miseries of war, if she would perpetuate the 
memories of the innocent townspeople who 
were slaughtered because they were Belgians, 
then she can effectually do it by preserving the 




The words, "Giite leute. Nicht zu pliindern" (''Good people. 

Do not plunder"), were scrawled on the door of this house 

in Louvain — 




-but there were no words on this house. 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 97 

ruins of Aerschot and Louvain, just as the ruins 
of Pompeii are preserved. Fence in these 
desolated cities; leave the shattered doors and 
the broken furniture as they are; let the bullet 
marks and the blood-stains remain, and it will 
do more than all the sermons that can be 
preached, than all the pictures that can be 
painted, than all the books that can be written, 
to drive home a realization of what is meant by 
that dreadful thing called War. 

It is in the neighborhood of twenty miles 
from Louvain to Brussels, and our car with its 
fluttering flags sped between lines of cheer- 
ing people all the way. Men stood by the 
roadside with uncovered heads as they saw the 
Stars and Stripes whirl by; women waved their 
handkerchiefs while tears coursed down their 
cheeks. As we neared Brussels news of our 
coming spread, and soon we were passing 
between solid walls of Belgians who waved hats 
and canes and handkerchiefs and screamed, 
^^ Vive VAmerique! Vive VAmerique!^^ I am 
not ashamed to say that a lump came in my 
throat and tears dimmed my eyes. To these 
helpless, homeless, hopeless people, the red- 



98 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

white-and-blue banner that streamed from our 
wind-shield really was a flag of the free. 

Brussels we found as quiet and orderly as 
Boston on a Sunday morning. So far as 
street scenes went we might have been in 
Berlin. German oflRcers and soldiers were 
scattered everywhere, lounging at the little 
iron tables in front of the cafes, or dining in the 
restaurants or strolling along the tree-shaded 
boulevards as unconcernedly and matter-of- 
factly as though they were in the Fatherland. 
Many of the officers had brought high, red- 
wheeled dog-carts with them, and were pleasure- 
driving in the outskirts of the city; others, 
accompanied by women who may or may not 
have been their wives, were picnicking in the 
Bois. Brussels had become, to all outward 
appearances at least, a German city. German 
flags flaunted defiantly from the roofs of the 
public buildings, several of which, including the 
Hotel de Ville, the Palais de Justice, and the 
Cathedral, were reported to have been mined. 
In the whole of the great city not a single 
Belgian flag was to be seen. The Belgian police 
were still performing their routine duties under 
German direction. The royal palace had been 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 99 

converted into a hospital for German wounded. 
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was occupied 
by the German General Staff. The walls and 
hoardings were plastered with proclamations 
signed by the military governor warning the 
inhabitants of the penalties which they would 
incur should they molest the German troops. 
The great square in front of the Gare du Nord, 
which was being used as a barracks, was 
guarded by a line of sentries, and no one but 
Germans in uniform were permitted to cross it. 
One other person did cross it, however, Ger- 
man regulations and sentries notwithstanding. 
Whedbee and I were lunching on Sunday noon 
in the front of the Palace Hotel, when a big 
limousine flying the American flag drew up on 
* the other side of the square and Mr. Julius Van 
Hee, the American Vice-Consul at Ghent, 
jumped out. He caught sight of us at the same 
moment that we saw him and started across the 
square toward us. He had not gone a dozen 
paces before a sentry levelled his rifle and 
gruffly commanded him to halt. 

"Go back!" shouted the sentry. "To' 
walk across the square forbidden is." 

"Go to the devil !" shouted back Van Hee. 



loo FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

**And stop pointing that gun at me, or I'll 
come over and knock that spiked helmet of 
yours olF. I'm American, and Fve more right 
here than you have." 

This latter argument being obviously un- 
answerable, the befuddled sentry saw nothing 
for it but to let him pass. 

Van Hee had come to Brussels, he told us, for 
the purpose of obtaining some vaccine, as the 
suppl}' in Ghent was running short, and the 
authorities were fearful of an epidemic. He also 
brought with him a package of letters from the 
German officers, man}^ of them of distinguished 
families, who had been captured b}" the Belgians 
and were imprisoned at Bruges. When Van 
Hee had obtained his vaccine, he called on 
General von Ludewitz and requested a safe- 
conduct back to Ghent. 

"I'm sorry, Mr. Van Hee," said the general, 
who had married an American and spoke 
Enghsh like a New Yorker, "but there's 
nothing doing. We can't permit any one to 
leave Brussels at present. Perhaps in a few 
days " 

"A few days won't do. General," Van Hee 
interrupted, "I must go back to-day, at once." 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE loi 

"I regret to say that for the time being it is 
quite impossible," said the general firmly. 

"I have here," said Van Hee, displaying the 
packet, "a large number of letters from the 
German officers who are imprisoned in Bel- 
gium. If I don't get the pass you don't get 
these letters." 

"You hold a winning hand, Mr. Van Hee," 
said the general, laughing, as he reached for 
pen and paper. 

But when Whedbee and I were ready to 
return to Antwerp it was a different matter. 
The German authorities, though scrupulously 
polite, were adamantine in their refusal to 
permit us to pass through the German lines. 
And we held no cards, as did Van Hee, with 
which to play diplomatic poker. So we were 
compelled to bluff. Telling the German com- 
mander that we would call on him again, we 
climbed into the car and quietly left the city 
by the same route we had followed upon enter- 
ing it the preceding day. All along the road 
we found soldiers smoking the cigarettes we 
had distributed to them. Instead of stopping 
us and demanding to see our papers they 
waved their hands cheerily and called, "Auf 



I02 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

wiedersehn! " As we knew that we could not 
get through Louvain without being stopped, 
we drove boldly up to headquarters and asked 
the general commanding the division if he 
would detail a stafF-officer to accompany us to 
the outer lines. (There seemed no need of 
mentioning the fact that we had no passes.) 
The general said, with profuse apologies, that 
he had no officer available at the moment, but 
hoped that a sergeant would do. We carried 
the sergeant with us as far as Aerschot, distrib- 
uting along the way what remained of our 
cigarettes. At Aerschot we were detained for 
nearly an hour, as the officer who had visited 
Atlantic City, Niagara Falls, and Coney Island 
insisted on our waiting while he sent for 
another officer who, until the outbreak of the 
war, had lived in Chicago. We tried not to 
show our impatience at the delay, but our hair 
stood on end every time a telephone bell 
tinkled. We were afraid that the staff in 
Brussels, learning of our unauthorized depar- 
ture, would telephone to the outposts to stop 
us. It was with a heartfelt sigh of relief that 
we finally shook hands with our hosts and left 
ruined Aerschot behind us. I opened up the 



UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE 103 

throttle, and the big car fled down the long, 
straight road which led to the Belgian lines 
like a hunted cat on the top of a back-yard 
fence. 



V 

WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 

IT was really a Pittsburgh chauffeur who 
was primarily responsible for my being in- 
vited to dine with the commander of the 
Ninth German Army. The chauffeur's name 
was William Van Calck and his employer was a 
gentleman who had amassed several millions 
manufacturing hats in the Smoky City. When 
war was declared the hat manufacturer and 
his famih' were motoring in Austria, with 
Van Calck at the wheel of the car. The car 
being a large and powerful one, it was promptly 
commandeered by the Austrian military au- 
thorities; the hat manufacturer and his family, 
thus dumped unceremoniously by the road- 
side, made their way as best they could to 
England; and Van Calck, who was a Belgian 
by birth, though a naturalized American, 
enlisted in the Belgian army and was detailed 
to drive one of the armored motor-cars which 
so effectively harassed the enemy during the 
early part of the campaign in Flanders. Now 

if Van Calck hadn't come tearing into Ghent 

104 



WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 105 

in his wheeled fortress on a sunny September 
morning he wouldn't have come upon a motor- 
car containing two German soldiers who had 
lost their way; if he had not met them, the 
two Germans would not have been wounded 
in the dramatic encounter which ensued; if 
the Germans had not been wounded it would 
not have been necessary for Mr. Julius Van Hee, 
the American Vice-Consul, to pay a hurried 
visit to General von Boehn, the German 
commander, to explain that the people of 
Ghent were not responsible for the affair and 
to beg that no retaliatory measures be taken 
against the city; if Mr. Van Hee had not 
visited General von Boehn the question of the 
attitude of the American Press would not have 
come up for discussion; and if it had not been 
discussed, General von Boehn would not have 
sent me an invitation through Mr. Van Hee 
to dine with him at his headquarters and hear 
the German side of the question. 

But perhaps I had better begin at the be- 
ginning. On September 8, then, the great Ger- 
man army which was moving from Brussels 
on France was within a few miles of Ghent. 
In the hope of inducing the Germans not to 



io6 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

enter the city, whose large and turbulent work- 
ing population would, it was feared, cause 
trouble in case of a military occupation, the 
burgomaster went out to confer with the Ger- 
man commander. An agreement was finally ar- 
rived at whereby the Germans consented to 
march around Ghent if certain requirements 
were complied with. These were that no Bel- 
gian troops should occupy the city, that the 
Garde Civique should be disarmed and their 
weapons surrendered, and that the municipality 
should supply the German forces with specified 
quantities of provisions and other supplies — the 
chief item, by the way, being a hundred thou- 
sand cigars. 

The burgomaster had not been back an hour 
when a military motor-car containing two 
armed German soldiers appeared in the city 
streets. It transpired afterward that they 
had been sent out to purchase medical supplies 
and, losing their way, had entered Ghent by 
mistake. At almost the same moment that 
the German car entered the city from the 
south a Belgian armored motor-car, armed 
with a machine gun and with a crew of three 
men and driven by the former Pittsburgh 
chauffeur, entered from the east on a scouting 



WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 107 

expedition. The two cars, both travelling at 
high speed, encountered each other at the 
head of the Rue de TAgneau, directly in front 
of the American Consulate. Vice-Consul Van 
Hee, standing in the doorway, was an eye- 
witness of what followed. 

The Germans, taken completely by surprise 
at the sight of the grim war car in its coat of 
elephant-gray bearing down upon them, threw 
on their power and attempted to escape, the 
man sitting beside the driver opening an 
ineffectual fire with his carbine. Regardless 
of the fact that the sidewalks were crowded 
with spectators, the Belgians opened on the 
fleeing Germans with their machine gun, which 
spurted lead as a garden hose spurts water. 
Van Calck, fearing that the Germans might 
escape, swerved his powerful car against the 
German machine precisely as a polo player 
"rides off" his opponent, the machine gun 
never ceasing its angry snarl. An instant later 
the driver of the German car dropped forward 
over his steering-wheel with blood gushing from 
a bullet wound in the head, while his com- 
panion, also badly wounded, threw up both 
hands in token of surrender. 



io8 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

Vice-Consul Van Hee instantly recognized 
the extremely grave consequences which might 
result to Ghent from this encounter, which 
had taken place within an hour after the 
burgomaster had assured the German com- 
mander that there were no Belgian soldiers in 
the city. Now, Mr. Julius Van Hee is what 
is popularly known in the United States as 
**a live wire." He is a shirt-sleeve diplomatist 
who, if he thought the occasion warranted it, 
would not hesitate to conduct diplomatic ne- 
gotiations in his nightshirt. Appreciating that 
as a result of this attack on German soldiers, 
which the Germans would probably charac- 
terize as treachery, Ghent stood in imminent 
danger of meeting the terrible fate of its sister 
cities of Aerschot and Louvain, which were 
sacked and burned on no greater provoca- 
tion, Mr. Van Hee jumped into his car and 
sought the burgomaster, whom he urged to 
accompany him without an instant's delay 
to German headquarters. The burgomaster, 
who had visions of being sent to Germany as 
a hostage, at first demurred; but Van Hee, 
disregarding his protestations, handed him his 
hat, hustled him into the car, and ordered the 



WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 109 

chauffeur to drive as though the Uhlans were 
behind him. 

They found General von Boehn and his 
staff quartered in a chateau a few miles outside 
the city. At first the German commander 
was furious with anger and threatened Ghent 
with the same punishment he had meted out 
to other cities where Germans had been fired 
on. Van Hee took a very firm stand, however. 
He reminded the general that Americans have 
a great sentimental interest in Ghent because 
of the treaty of peace between England and 
the United States which was signed there a 
century ago, and he warned him that the 
burning of the city would do more than any- 
thing else to lose the Germans the sympathy 
of the American people. 

"If you will give me your personal word," 
said the general finally, "that there will be 
no further attacks upon Germans who may 
enter the city, and that the wounded soldiers 
will be taken under American protection and 
sent to Brussels by the American consular 
authorities when they have recovered, I will 
agree to spare Ghent and will not even demand 
a money indemnity." 



no FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

In the course of the informal conversation 
which followed, General von Boehn remarked 
that copies of American papers containing 
articles by E. Alexander Powell, criticising the 
Germans' treatment of the Belgian civil popu- 
lation, had come to his attention, and he 
regretted that he could not have an oppor- 
tunity to talk with their author and give him 
the German version of the incidents in ques- 
tion. Mr. Van Hee said that, by a curious 
coincidence, I had arrived in Ghent that very 
morning, whereupon the general asked him 
to bring me out to dinner on the following day 
and issued a safe-conduct through the German 
lines for the purpose. 

We started early the next morning. As 
there was some doubt about the propriety of 
my taking a Belgian military driver into the 
German lines I drove the car myself. And, 
though nothing was said about a photographer, 
I took with me Donald Thompson. Before 
we passed the city limits of Ghent things be- 
gan to happen. Entering a street which leads 
through a district inhabited by the working 
classes, we suddenly found our way barred by 
a mob of several thousand excited Flemings. 




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WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS iii 

Above a sea of threatening arms and bran- 
dished sticks and angry faces rose the figures 
of two German soldiers, with carbines slung 
across their backs, mounted on work horses 
which they had evidently hastily unharnessed 
from a wagon. Like their unfortunate com- 
rades of the motor-car episode, they too had 
strayed into the city by mistake. As we 
approached the crowd made a concerted rush 
for them. A blast from my siren opened a 
lane for us, however, and I drove the car 
alongside the terrified Germans. 

"Quick!" shouted Van Hee in German. 
"OiF your horses and into the car ! Hide 
your rifles ! Take off your helmets ! Sit on 
the floor and keep out of sight !" 

The mob, seeing its prey escaping, surged 
about us with a roar. For a moment things 
looked very ugly. Van Hee jumped on the 
seat. 

"I am the American Consul!" he shouted. 
"These men are under my protection ! You 
are civilians, attacking German soldiers in 
uniform. If they are harmed your city will 
be burned about your ears." 

At that moment a burly Belgian shouldered 



112 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

his way through the crowd and, leaping on 
the running-board, levelled a revolver at the 
Germans cowering in the tonneau. Quick as 
thought Thompson knocked up the man's 
hand, and at the same instant I threw on the 
power. The big car leaped forward and the 
mob scattered before it. It was a close call 
for every one concerned, but a much closer 
call for Ghent; for had those German soldiers 
been murdered by civilians in the city streets 
no power on earth could have saved the city 
from German vengeance. General von Boehn 
told me so himself. 

A few minutes later, as playlets follow each 
other in quick succession on a stage, the scene 
changed from near tragedy to screaming farce. 
As we came thundering into the little town 
of Sotteghem, which is the Sleepy Hollow of 
Belgium, we saw, rising from the middle of 
the town square, a pyramid, at least ten feet 
high, of wardrobe trunks, steamer trunks, bags, 
and suitcases. From the summit of this 
extraordinary monument floated a huge Ameri- 
can flag. As our car came to a halt there rose 
a chorus of exclamations in all the dialects 
between Maine and California, and from the 



WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 113 

door of a near-by cafe came pouring a flood 
of Americans. They proved to be a lost 
detachment of that great army of tourists 
which, at the beginning of hostihties, started 
on its mad retreat for the coast, leaving Europe 
strewn with their belongings. This particular 
detachment had been cut off in Brussels by 
the tide of German invasion, and, as food 
supplies were running short, they determined 
to make a dash — perhaps crawl would be a 
better word — for Ostend, making the journey 
in two lumbering farm wagons. On reaching 
Sotteghem, however, the Belgian drivers, 
hearing that the Germans were approaching, 
refused to go farther and unceremoniously 
dumped their passengers in the town square. 
When we arrived they had been there for a 
day and a night and had begun to think that 
it was to be their future home. It was what 
might be termed a mixed assemblage, including 
several women of wealth and fashion who had 
been motoring on the Continent and had had 
their cars taken from them, two prim school- 
teachers from Brooklyn, a mine owner from 
West Virginia, a Pennsylvania Quaker, and a 
quartet of professional tango dancers — artists. 



114 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

they called themselves — ^who had been doing 
a "turn" at a Brussels music-hall when the 
war suddenly ended their engagement. Van 
Hee and I skirmished about and, after much 
argument, succeeded in hiring two farm carts 
to transport the fugitives to Ghent. For 
the thirty-mile journey the thrifty peasants 
modestly demanded four hundred francs — 
and got it. The last I saw of my compatriots 
they were perched on top of their luggage 
piled high on two creaking carts, rumbling 
down the road to Ghent with their huge flag 
flying above them. They were singing at the 
top of their voices, "We'll Never Go There 
Any More." 

Half a mile or so out of Sotteghem our road 
debouched into the great highway which leads 
through Lille to Paris, and we suddenly found 
ourselves in the midst of the German army. 
It was a sight never to be forgotten. Far as 
the eye could see stretched solid columns of 
marching men, pressing westward, ever west- 
ward. The army was advancing in three 
mighty columns along three parallel roads, 
the dense masses of moving men in their 
elusive gray-green uniforms looking for all the 




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WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 115 

world like three monstrous serpents crawling 
across the countryside. 

The American flags which fluttered from 
our wind-shield proved a passport in them- 
selves, and as we approached the close-locked 
ranks parted to let us pass, and then closed 
in behind us. For five solid hours, travelling 
always at express-train speed, we motored 
between walls of marching men. In time the 
constant shufile of boots and the rhythmic 
swing of gray-clad arms and shoulders grew 
maddening, and I became obsessed with the 
fear that I would send the car ploughing into 
the human hedge on either side. It seemed 
that the interminable ranks would never end, 
and so far as we were concerned they never 
did end, for we never saw the head of that 
mighty column. We passed regiment after 
regiment, brigade after brigade of infantry; 
then Hussars, Cuirassiers, Uhlans, field-bat- 
teries, more infantry, more field-guns, ambu- 
lances with staring red crosses painted on their 
canvas tops, then gigantic siege-guns, their 
grim muzzles pointing skyward, each drawn by 
thirty straining horses; engineers, sappers and 
miners with picks and spades, pontoon wagons, 



ii6 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

carts piled high with what looked like masses 
of yellow silk but which proved to be balloons, 
bicyclists with carbines slung upon their backs, 
hunter fashion, aeroplane outfits, bearded and 
spectacled doctors of the medical corps, ar- 
mored motor-cars with curved steel rails above 
them as a protection against the wires which 
the Belgians were in the habit of stringing across 
the roads, battery after battery of pompoms 
(as the quick-firers are descriptively called), and 
after them more batteries of spidery-looking, 
lean-barrelled machine guns, more Uhlans — - 
the sunlight gleaming on their lance tips and 
the breeze fluttering their pennons into a black- 
and-white cloud above them, and then infantry 
in spiked and linen-covered helmets, more 
infantry and still more infantry — all sweeping 
by, irresistibly as a mighty river, with their 
faces turned towards France. 

This was the Ninth Field Army, composed 
of the very flower of the German Empire, 
including the magnificent troops of the Impe- 
rial Guard. It was first and last a fighting 
army. The men were all young, and they 
struck me as being as keen as razors and as 
hard as nails. Their equipment was the acme 







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WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 117 

of efficiency, serviceability, and comfort. The 
co.^r of their uniforms was better than any 
of the shades of khaki; a hundred yards away 
a regiment seemed to melt into the landscape. 
Their boots, of brown leather made after the 
Russian pattern, were particularly good — so 
good, in fact, that time and again I have seen 
Belgian peasants risk their lives on the battle- 
field to strip German corpses of their foot- 
gear. Their horses were magnificent — ^well- 
fed and well-cared-for. I have never seen 
better. I was particularly impressed by the 
size and number of the field-guns of the 
Imperial Guard, which are of considerably 
larger caliber than any used in the American 
army. Most interesting of all, however, were 
five gigantic howitzers, each drawn by sixteen 
pairs of horses, which at a distance of a dozen 
miles can tear a city to pieces. I would have 
been still more interested in them, I suppose, 
could I have known that, weeks later, they 
were to send the city in which I was living 
crashing about my ears. 

I was impressed with the fact that every 
contingency seemed to have been provided for. 
Nothing was left to chance. The maps of 



ii8 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

Belgium, with which every officer and non- 
commissioned officer was provided, were the 
finest examples of topography I have ever seen. 
Every path, every farm-building, every clump 
of trees was denoted. They were as good, if 
not better, than the maps used by the Belgian 
General Staff. At one place I saw a huge army 
wagon containing a complete printing-press 
drawn up beside the road, and the morning 
edition of the Deutsche Krieger Zeitung was 
being printed and distributed to the passing 
soldiery. Its news matter consisted mainly of 
accounts of German victories of which I had 
never heard, but which seemed to greatly cheer 
the men. Field kitchens, with smoke pour- 
ing from their stovepipes, rumbled down the 
lines, the white-aproned cooks clinging to the 
rear as the stoker clings to a fire-engine, serving 
hot soup and cojfFee to the marching men, who 
held out their tin cups to be filled without 
leaving the column. There were wagons 
filled with army cobblers, mending the soldiers' 
shoes, sitting cross-legged on their benches, 
sewing away as industriously and as uncon- 
cernedly as though they were back in their 
httle shops in the Fatherland. Other wagons. 



WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 119 

to all appearances ordinary two-wheeled farm 
carts, contained "nests'* of nine machine guns 
which could instantly be brought into action. 
The medical corps was magnificent; as busi- 
nesslike, as completely equipped, and as efficient 
as a great city hospital — as, indeed, it should 
be, for no hospital ever built was called upon 
to treat so many emergency cases. One section 
of the medical corps consisted wholly of pedi- 
curists, who examined and treated the feet 
of the men. If a German soldier has even a 
suspicion of a corn or a bunion or a chafed 
heel and does not instantly report to the 
regimental pedicurist for treatment he is 
subject to severe punishment. He is not 
permitted to neglect his feet — or for that 
matter his teeth, or any other portion of his 
body — because his feet do not belong to him 
but to the Kaiser, and the Kaiser expects 
those feet kept in condition to perform long 
and arduous marches and to fight his battles. 
At one cross-roads I saw a soldier with a horse- 
clipping machine. An officer stood beside 
him and closely scanned the heads of the passing 
men. Whenever he spied a soldier whose hair 
was a fraction of an inch too long, that soldier 



120 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

was called out of the ranks, the clipper was 
run over his head as quickly and dexterously 
as an expert shearer fleeces sheep, and then 
the man, his hair once more too short to harbor 
dirt, ran to rejoin his company. They must 
have cut the hair of a hundred men an hour. 
It was a fascinating performance. Men on 
bicycles, with coils of insulated wire slung on 
reels between them, strung field-telephones 
from tree to tree, so that the general com- 
manding could converse with any part of 
the fifty-mile-long column. The whole army 
never slept. When half was resting the other 
half was advancing. The German soldier is 
treated as a valuable machine, which must be 
speeded up to the highest possible efficiency. 
Therefore he is well-fed, well-shod, well- 
clothed — and worked as a negro teamster works 
a mule. Only men who are well-cared-for 
can march thirty-five miles a day, week in 
and week out. Only once did I see a man 
ill treated. A sentry on duty in front of the 
general headquarters failed to salute an officer 
with sufficient promptness, whereupon the 
oflficer lashed him again and again across the 
face with a riding-whip. Though welts rose 



WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 121 

at every blow, the soldier stood rigidly at 
attention and never quivered. It was not a 
pleasant thing to witness. Had it been a 
British or an American soldier who was thus 
treated there would have been an officer's 
funeral the next morning. 

As we were passing a German outpost a 
sentry ran into the road and signalled us to 
stop. 

"Are you Americans .?" he asked. 

"We are/' said I. 

"Then I have orders to take you to the 
commandant," said he. 

"But I am on my way to dine with General 
von Boehn. I have a pass signed by the 
General himself and I am late already." 

"No matter," the man insisted stubbornly. 
"You must come with me. The commander 
has so ordered it." 

So there was nothing for it but to accompany 
the soldier. Though we tried to laugh away 
our nervousness, I am quite willing to admit 
that we had visions of courts-martial and prison 
cells and firing-parties. You never know just 
where you are at with the Germans. You see, 
they have no sense of humor. 



122 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

We found the commandant and his stafF 
quartered at a farmhouse a half-mile down 
the road. He was a stout, florid-faced, bois- 
terous captain of pioneers. 

**rm sorry to detain you," he said apolo- 
getically, "but I ordered the sentries to stop 
the first American car that passed, and yours 
happened to be the unlucky one. I have a 
brother in America and I wish to send a letter 
to him to let him know that all is well with me. 
Would you have the goodness to post it?" 

"I'll do better than that. Captain," said I. 
"If you will give me your brother's name and 
address, and if he takes the New York Worlds 
he will read in to-morrow morning's paper 
that I have met you." 

And the next morning, just as I had promised, 
Mr. F. zur Nedden, of Rosebank, New York, 
read in the columns of his morning paper that 
I had left his soldier-brother comfortably 
quartered in a farmhouse on the outskirts of 
Renaix, Belgium, in excellent health but drink- 
ing more red wine than was likely to be good 
for him. 

It was now considerably past midday, and 
we were within a few miles of the French 



WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 123 

frontier, when I saw the guidon which signified 
the presence of the head of the army, planted 
at the entrance to a splendid old chateau. As 
we passed between the stately gate-posts, 
whirled up the splendid, tree-lined drive and 
came to a stop in front of the terrace, a dozen 
officers came running out to meet us. So 
cordial and informal were their greetings that 
I felt as though I were being welcomed at a 
country-house in America instead of the head- 
quarters of a German army in the field. So 
perfect was the field-telephone service that the 
staff had been able to keep in touch with our 
progress ever since, five hours before, we had 
entered the German lines, and had waited 
dinner for us. General von Boehn I found 
to be a red-faced, gray-mustached, jovial old 
warrior, who seemed very much worried for 
fear that we were not getting enough to eat, 
and particularly enough to drink. He explained 
that the Belgian owners of the chateau had had 
the bad taste to run away and take their 
servants with them, leaving only one bottle 
of champagne in the cellar. That bottle was 
good, however, as far as it went. 

Nearly all the officers spoke English, and 



124 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

during the meal the conversation was chiefly of 
the United States, for one of them had been 
attached to the German Embassy at Washing- 
ton and knew the golf course at Chevy Chase 
better than I do myself; another had fished 
in California and shot elk in Wyoming; and 
a third had attended the army school at Fort 
Riley. After dinner we grouped ourselves on 
the terrace and Thompson made photographs 
of us. They are probably the only ones — in 
this war, at least — of a German general and 
an American war correspondent who is not 
under arrest. Then we gathered about a 
table on which was spread a staff map of the 
war area and got down to serious business. 

The general began by asserting that the 
accounts of atrocities perpetrated by German 
troops on Belgian non-combatants were lies. 

"Look at these officers about you," he said. 
"They are gentlemen, like yourself. Look at 
the soldiers marching past in the road out 
there. Most of them are the fathers of families. 
Surely you do not believe that they would do 
the unspeakable things they have been accused 
of?" 

"Three days ago, General." said L "I was 




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WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 125 

in Aerschot. The whole town is now but a 
ghastly, blackened ruin." 

"When we entered Aerschot/* was the 
reply, "the son of the burgomaster came into 
the room where our officers were dining and 
assassinated the Chief of Staff. What followed 
was retribution. The townspeople got only 
what they deserved." 

"But why wreak your vengeance on women 
and children?" I asked. 

"None have been killed," the general as- 
serted positively. 

"Tm sorry to contradict you, General," I 
asserted with equal positiveness, "but I have 
myself seen their bodies. So has Mr. Gibson, 
the secretary of the American Legation in 
Brussels, who was present during the destruc- 
tion of Louvain." 

"Of course," replied General von Boehn, 
"there is always danger of women and children 
being killed during street fighting if they insist 
on coming into the streets. It is unfortunate, 
but it is war." 

"But how about a woman's body I saw 
with the hands and feet cut off.? How about 
the white-haired man and his son whom I 



126 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

helped to bury outside of Sempst, who had 
been killed merely because a retreating Belgian 
soldier had shot a German soldier outside 
their house ? There were twenty-two bayonet 
wounds in the old man's face. I counted 
them. How about the little girl, two years 
old, who was shot while in her mother's arms 
by a Uhlan and whose funeral I attended at 
Heyst-op-den-Berg ? How about the old man 
near Vilvorde who was hung by his hands from 
the rafters of his house and roasted to death 
by a bonfire being built under him ?" 

The general seemed taken aback by the 
exactness of my information. 

"Such things are horrible if true," he said. 
"Of course, our soldiers, like soldiers in all 
armies, sometimes get out of hand and do 
things which we would never tolerate if we 
knew it. At Louvain, for example, I sen- 
tenced two soldiers to twelve years' penal 
servitude each for assaulting a woman." 

"Apropos of Louvain," I remarked, "why 
did you destroy the library?" 

"We regretted that as much as any one else," 
was the answer. "It caught fire from burning 
houses and we could not save it." 




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WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 127 

"But why did you burn Louvain at all?" 
I asked. 

"Because the townspeople fired on our 
troops. We actually found machine guns in 
some of the houses. And," smashing his fist 
down upon the table, "whenever civilians fire 
upon our troops we will teach them a lasting 
lesson. If women and children insist on getting 
in the way of bullets, so much the worse for 
the women and children." 

"How do you explain the bombardment of 
Antwerp by Zeppelins.?" I inquired. 

"Zeppelins have orders to drop their bombs 
only on fortifications and soldiers," he answered. 

"As a matter of fact," I remarked, "they 
destroyed only private houses and innocent 
civilians, several of whom were women. If one 
of those bombs had dropped two hundred 
yards nearer my hotel I wouldn't be here to-day 
smoking one of your excellent cigars." 

"That is a calamity which, thank God, 
didn't happen," he replied. 

"If you feel for my safety as deeply as that, 
General," I said earnestly, "you can make 
quite sure of my coming to no harm by sending 
no more Zeppelins." 



128 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

"Well, Herr Powell," he said, laughing, 
"we will think about it. And,*' he continued 
gravely, "I trust that you will tell the American 
people, through your great paper, what I have 
told you to-day. Let them hear our side of 
this atrocity business. It is only justice that 
they should be made familiar with both sides 
of the question." 

I have quoted my conversation with General 
von Boehn as nearly verbatim as I can remember 
it. I have no comments to make. I will leave 
it to my readers to decide for themselves just 
how convincing were the answers of the German 
General Staff — for General von Boehn was 
but its mouthpiece — to the Belgian accusations. 

Before we began our conversation I asked 
the general if my photographer, Thompson, 
might be permitted to take photographs of the 
great army which was passing. Five minutes 
later Thompson whirled away in a military 
motor-car, ciceroned by the officer who had 
attended the army school at Fort Riley. It 
seems that they stopped the car beside the 
road, in a place where the light was good, and 
when Thompson saw approaching a regiment 
or a battery or a squadron of which he wished 



WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 129 

a picture he would tell the officer, whereupon 
the officer would blow a whistle and the whole 
column would halt. 

"Just wait a few minutes until the dust 
settles," Thompson would remark, lighting a 
cigar, and the Ninth Imperial Army, whose 
columns stretched over the countryside as 
far as the eye could see, would stand in its 
tracks until the air was sufficiently clear to get 
a good picture. 

A field-battery of the Imperial Guard rum- 
bled past and Thompson made some remark 
about the accuracy of the American gunners at 
Vera Cruz. 

"Let us show you what our gunners can 
do," said the officer, and he gave an order. 
There were more orders — a perfect volley of 
them. A bugle shrilled, eight horses strained 
against their collars, the drivers cracked their 
whips, the cannoneers put their shoulders to 
the wheels, and a gun left the road and swung 
into position in an adjacent field. On a knoll 
three miles away an ancient windmill was beat- 
ing the air with its huge wings. A shell hit 
the windmill and tore it into splinters. 

"Good work," Thompson observed criti- 



130 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

cally. "If those fellows of yours keep on 
they'll be able to get a job in the American 
navy when the war is over." 

In all the annals of modern war I do not 
believe that there is a parallel to this little 
Kansas photographer halting, with peremptory 
hand, an advancing army and leisurely photo- 
graphing it, regiment by regiment, and then 
having a field-gun of the Imperial Guard go 
into action solely to gratify his curiosity. 

They were very courteous and hospitable to 
me, those German officers, and I was immensely 
interested in all that I saw. But, when all 
is said and done, they impressed me not as 
human beings, who have weaknesses and virtues, 
likes and dislikes of their own, but rather as 
parts, more or less important, of a mighty and 
highly efficient machine which is directed and 
controlled by a cold and calculating intelligence 
in far-away Berlin. That machine has about 
as much of the human element as a meat- 
chopper, as a steam roller, as the death chair 
at Sing Sing. Its mission is to crush, pulverize, 
obliterate, destroy, and no considerations of 
civilization or chivalry or humanity will affect 
it. I think that the Germans, with their grim, 




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WITH THE SPIKED HELMETS 131 

set faces, their monotonous uniforms, and the 
ceaseless shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of their boots 
must have gotten on my nerves, for it was with 
a distinct feeling of relief that I turned the 
bonnet of my car once more towards Antwerp 
and my friends the Belgians. 



VI 
ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 

IN writing of the battles in Belgium I find 
myself at a loss as to what names to give 
them. After the treaty-makers have af- 
fixed their signatures to a piece of parch- 
ment and the armchair historians have settled 
down to the task of writing a connected ac- 
count of the campaign, the various engage- 
ments will doubtless be properly classified and 
labelled — and under the names which they 
will receive in the histories we, who were 
present at them, will probably not recognize 
them at all. Until such time, then, as history 
has granted them the justice of perspective, 
I can only refer to them as "the fight at 
Sempst" or "the first engagement at Alost" 
or "the battle of Vilvorde" or "the taking of 
Termonde." Not only this, but the engage- 
ments that seemed to us to be battles, or 
remarkably lifelike imitations of battles, may 
be dismissed by the historians as unimpor- 
tant skirmishes and contacts, while those en- 

132 




Steel bridge at Termonde dynamited by the Belgians. 




Another bridge at Termonde destroyed by shell-fire. 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 133 

gagements that we carelessly referred to at 
the time as "scraps" may well prove, in the 
light of future events, to have been of far 
greater significance than we realized. I don't 
even know how many engagements I witnessed, 
for I did not take the trouble to keep count. 
Thompson, who was with me from the beginning 
of the campaign to the end, told the reporters 
who interviewed him upon his return to London 
that we had been present at thirty-two engage- 
ments, large and small. Though I do not 
vouch, mind you, for the accuracy of this 
assertion, it is not as improbable as it sounds, 
for, from the middle of August to the fall of 
Antwerp in the early part of October, it was 
a poor day that didn't produce a fight of some 
sort. 

The fighting in Belgium at this stage of the 
war may be said to have been confined to an 
area within a triangle whose corners were 
Antwerp, Aerschot, and Alost. The southern 
side of this triangle, which ran somewhat to 
the south of Malines, was nearly forty miles 
in length, and it was this forty-mile front, 
extending from Aerschot on the east to Alost 
on the west, which, during the earlier stages of 



134 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

the campaign, formed the Belgian battle-line. 
As the campaign iprogressed and the Germans 
developed their offensive, the Belgians were 
slowly forced back within the converging sides 
of the triangle until they were squeezed into 
the angle formed by Antwerp, where they made 
their last stand. 

The theatre of operations was, from the 
standpoint of a professional onlooker like 
myself, very inconsiderately arranged. Nature 
had provided neither orchestra stalls nor boxes. 
All the seats were bad. In fact it was quite 
impossible to obtain a good view of the stage 
and of the uniformed actors who were pre- 
senting the most stupendous spectacle in all 
history upon it. The whole region, you see, 
was absolutely flat — as flat as the top of a table 
— and there wasn't anything even remotely 
resembling a hill anywhere. To make matters 
worse, the country was crisscrossed by a 
perfect network of rivers and brooks and 
canals and ditches; the highways and the 
railways, which had to be raised to keep them 
from being washed out by the periodic inun- 
dations, were so thickly screened by trees as 
to be quite useless for purposes of observation; 




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ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 135 

and in the rare places where a rise in the ground 
might have enabled one to get a comprehen- 
sive view of the surrounding country, dense 
groves of trees or red-and-white villages almost 
invariably intervened. One could be within 
a few hundred yards of the firing-Hne and 
literally not see a thing save the fleecy puffs 
of bursting shrapnel. Indeed, I don't know 
what we should have done had it not been for 
the church towers. These were conveniently 
sprinkled over the landscape — every cluster of 
houses seemed to have one — and did their best 
to make up for the region's topographical 
shortcomings. The only disadvantage attach- 
ing to the use of the church spires as places to 
view the fighting from was that the military 
observers and the officers controlling the fire 
of the batteries used them for the same purpose. 
The enemy knew this, of course, and almost 
the first thing he did, therefore, was to open 
fire on them with his artillery and drive those 
observers out. This accounts for the fact that 
in many sections of Belgium there is not a 
church spire left standing. When we ascended 
a church tower, therefore, for the purpose of 
obtaining a general view of an engagement. 



136 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

we took our chances and we knew it. More 
than once, when the enemy got the range and 
their shells began to shriek and yowl past the 
belfry in which I was stationed, I have raced 
down the rickety ladders at a speed which, 
under normal conditions, would probably have 
resulted in my breaking my neck. In view of 
the restrictions imposed upon correspondents 
in the French and Russian theatres of war, I 
suppose that instead of finding fault with the 
seating arrangements I should thank my lucky 
stars that I did not have to write my despatches 
with the aid of an ordnance map and a guide- 
book in a hotel bedroom a score or more of 
miles from the firing-line. 

The Belgian field arm}^ consisted of six divi- 
sions and a brigade of cavalry and numbered, 
on paper at least, about 180,000 men. I very 
much doubt, however, if King Albert had 
in the field at any one time more than 120,000 
men — a very large proportion of whom were, 
of course, raw recruits. Now the Belgian army, 
when all is said and done, was not an army 
according to the Continental definition; it was 
not much more than a glorified police force, 
a militia. No one had ever dreamed that it 




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ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 137 

would be called upon to fight, and hence, 
when war came, it was wholly unprepared. 
That it was able to offer the stubborn and 
heroic resistance which it did to the advance 
of the German legions speaks volumes for 
Belgian stamina and courage. Many of the 
troops were armed with rifles of an obsolete 
pattern, the supply of ammunition was insuffi- 
cient, and though the artillery was on the 
whole of excellent quality, it was placed at a 
tremendous disadvantage by the superior range 
and caliber of the German field-guns. The 
men did not even have the protection afforded 
by neutral-colored uniforms, but fought from 
first to last in clothes of blue and green and 
blazing scarlet. As I stood one day in the 
Place de Meir in Antwerp and watched a 
regiment of mud-bespattered Guides clatter 
past, it was hard to beheve that I was living 
in the twentieth century and not in the 
beginning of the nineteenth, for instead of 
serviceable uniforms of gray or drab or khaki, 
these men wore the befrogged green jackets, 
the cherry-colored breeches, and the huge 
fur busbies which one associates with the sol- 
diers of Napoleon. 



138 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

The Carabineers, for example, wore uniforms 
of bottle-green and queer sugar-loaf hats of 
patent leather which resembled the head-gear 
of the Directoire period. Both the Grenadiers 
and the infantry of the line marched and fought 
and slept in uniforms of heavy blue cloth piped 
with scarlet and small, round, visorless fatigue 
caps which afforded no protection from either 
sun or rain. Some of the men remedied this 
by fitting their caps with green reading-shades, 
such as undergraduates wear when they are 
cramming for examinations, so that at first 
glance a regiment looked as though its ranks 
were filled with either jockeys or students. 
The gendarmes — ^who, by the way, were always 
to be found where the fighting was hottest— 
were the most unsuitably uniformed of all, 
for the blue coats and silver aiguillettes and 
towering bearskins which served to impress 
the simple country folk made splendid targets 
for the German marksmen. This medley of 
picturesque and brilliant uniforms was wonder- 
fully effective, of course, and whenever I came 
upon a group of Lancers in sky-blue and yellow 
lounging about the door of a wayside tavern 
or met a patrol of Guides in their green jackets 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 139 

and scarlet breeches trotting along a country 
road, I always had the feeling that I was looking 
at a painting by Meissonier or Detaille. 

At the beginning of the war the Belgian 
cavalry was as well mounted as that of any 
European army, many of the officers having 
Irish hunters, while the men were mounted on 
Hungarian-bred stock. The almost incessant 
campaigning, combined with lack of proper food 
and care, had its effect upon the horses, how- 
ever, and before the campaign in Flanders was 
half over the cavalry mounts were a raw- 
boned and sorry-looking lot. The Belgian 
field artillery was horsed magnificently: the 
sturdy, hardy animals native to Luxembourg 
and the Ardennes making admirable material 
for gun teams, while the great Belgian draught- 
horses could scarcely have been improved upon 
for the army's heavier work. 

Speaking of cavalry, the thing that I most 
wanted to see when I went to the war was a 
cavalry charge. I had seen mounted troops 
in action, of course, both in Africa and in Asia, 
but they had brown skins and wore fantastic 
uniforms. What I wanted to see was one of 
those charges such as Meissonier used to paint — 



I40 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

scarlet breeches and steel helmets and a sea of 
brandished sword-blades and all that sort of 
thing. But when I confided my wish to an 
American army officer whom I met on the boat 
going over he promptly discouraged me. 
"Cavalry charges are a thing of the past," he 
asserted. "There will never be one again. 
The modern high-power rifle has made them im- 
possible. Henceforward cavalry will only be used 
for scouting purposes or as mounted infantry.'* 
He spoke with great positiveness, I remember, 
having been, you see, in both the Cuban and 
PhiHppine campaigns. According to the text- 
books and the military experts and the arm- 
chair tacticians he was perfectly right; I 
believe that all of the writers on military 
subjects agree in saying that cavalry charges 
are obsolete as a form of attack. But the 
trouble with the Belgians was that they didn't 
play the war game according to the rules in 
the book. They were very primitive in their 
conceptions of warfare. Their idea was that 
whenever they got within sight of a German 
regiment to go after that regiment and smash 
it, exterminate it, wipe it out, and they didn't 
care whether in doing it they used horse, foot, 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 141 

or guns. It was owing, therefore, to this total 
disregard for the rules laid down in the text- 
books that I saw my cavalry charge. Let me 
tell you about it while I have the chance, for 
there is no doubt that cavalry charges are 
getting scarce and I may never see another. 
It was in the region between Termonde and 
Alost. This is a better country for cavalry 
to manoeuvre in than most parts of Flanders, 
for sometimes one can go almost a mile without 
being stopped by a canal. A considerable force 
of Germans had pushed north from Alost and 
the Belgian commander ordered a brigade of 
cavalry, composed of the two regiments of 
Guides and, if I remember rightly, two regi- 
ments of Lancers, to go out and drive them 
back. After a morning spent in skirmishing 
and manoeuvring for position, the Belgian 
cavalry commander got his Germans where he 
wanted them. The Germans were in front 
of a wood, and between them and the Belgians 
lay as pretty a stretch of open country as a 
cavalryman could ask for. Now the Germans 
occupied a strong position, mind you, and the 
proper thing to have done according to the 
books would have been to have demoralized 



142 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

them with shell fire and then to have followed 
it up with an infantry attack. But the grizzled 
old Belgian commander did nothing of the 
sort. He had fifteen hundred troopers who 
were simply praying for a chance to go at the 
Germans with cold steel, and he gave them 
the chance they wanted. Tossing away his 
cigarette and tightening the chin-strap of his 
busby, he trotted out in front of his men. 
** Right into line!" he bellowed. Two long 
lines — one the Guides, in green and scarlet, 
the other the Lancers, in blue and yellow — 
spread themselves across the fields. "Trot!" 
The bugles squealed the order. "Gallop!" 
The forest of lances dropped from vertical to 
horizontal and the cloud of gayly fluttering 
pennons changed into a bristling hedge of steel. 
''Charge!'' came the order, and the spurs 
went home. " Vive la Belgique I Five la 
Belgique I " roared the troopers — and the 
Germans, not liking the look of those long and 
cruel lances, broke and ran. Then, their work 
having been accomplished, the cavalry came 
trotting back again. Of course, from a military 
standpoint it was an affair of small importance, 
but so far as color and action and excitement 




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ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 143 

were concerned it was worth having gone to 
Belgium to see. 

Most people still cling to those romantic 
and spectacular conceptions of war which no 
longer bear any relation to the actuality. 
They do not seem to comprehend that war is 
no longer a thing of dash and clash and glory, 
but a huge business which is as scientifically 
and unemotionally directed and as method- 
ically conducted as the building of a transcon- 
tinental railway, or the digging of an inter- 
oceanic canal. The public's false conception 
of modern warfare is largely due to the illus- 
trated papers, which are continually depict- 
ing incidents, true in themselves, but isolated 
and not characteristic, as, for example, the 
storming of the German trenches by the 
Ghurkas, and the charge of the London Scot- 
tish. 

When the average man, who draws his ideas 
of warfare from the newspapers and the New 
York Hippodrome, visualizes a battle, he doubt- 
less pictures two lines of soldiers facing each 
other across an open field and blazing away as 
fast as they can work their rifles; with batteries 
in their immediate rear crashing out death 



144 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

and destruction at five-second intervals; the 
sky filled with the fleecy patches of cotton-wool 
which are bursting shrapnel; waves of infantry 
rolling forward in an attempt to carry the 
trenches with the bayonet; men falling every- 
where; the fields carpeted with dead and dying 
men; orderlies and aides-de-camp dashing here 
and there on foam-flecked horses; aeroplanes 
circling overhead and dropping occasional 
bombs; the crash of the field-guns, the rattle of 
musketry, the cheers of the soldiers, the orders 
of officers, and the blare of bugles combining 
to make a racket which splits the ear-drums. 

Now, as a matter of fact, that is not what 
happens at all. In the first place, the noise, 
though loud, is by no means deafening. (When 
a shell bursts in your immediate vicinity it is, 
of course, a diff'erent matter.) In the second 
place, there is no confusion. Each man has 
his work to do, and he does it with as little 
fuss as possible. Imagine, if you please, a line 
of men crouching resignedly in the advance 
trenches and, stretching in front of them, what 
looks like an absolutely deserted countryside. 
It is not deserted, however, as a man instantly 
discovers if he incautiously raises his head an 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 145 

inch or so above the earthen parapet or wrig- 
gles past a spot on which a German sharp- 
shooter has had his rifle trained for hours. 
Every few seconds a shell which does not kill 
shrieks and moans overhead, to explode some- 
where in the rear, and occasionally a shell which 
does kill drops right into the trenches and 
turns them into a shambles. But there is no 
glory, mind you, no flag-waving, no hip-hurrah- 
and-here-we-go business, nothing even remotely 
approaching the spectacular. Dismiss that 
from your mind once and for all. 

A few hundred yards back of the trenches 
are the reserves, usually sheltered by woods or 
farm-buildings or hedges, the men lying about 
on the ground smoking and yawning and yarn- 
ing as unconcernedly as though they were 
mill-hands waiting for the one o'clock whistle 
to blow. 

A battery comes up at a jog-trot — not at the 
mad gallop which the war artists are so fond of 
depicting — and unlimbers in a near-by beet 
field. The observation ladder, looking like a 
huge camera tripod, is unstrapped and raised, 
and an officer cautiously ascends it and peers 
oflF across the countryside through his field- 



146 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

glasses. The gunners, looking very much 
bored with life and heartily sick of the whole 
business, are grouped about their pieces in the 
positions prescribed by the regulations. There 
is no excitement and no enthusiasm. Finally, 
the officer finds what he has been searching for, 
a junior officer takes a church tower or a wind- 
mill in the rear of the battery as a bench-mark, 
makes a few mathematical calculations, and 
calls the range. The officer in command of 
the battery quietly gives the order to fire; a 
sergeant who has been standing with upraised 
arm brings his arm down sharply, like a sema- 
phore; there are four splitting crashes — one 
after another unless they are firing salvoes — 
four stabs of flame, four lean gray barrels vio- 
lently recoiling, four wisps of smoke as the 
breeches are thrown open and the four hot and 
smoking shells replaced by four new and gleam- 
ing projectiles — and then the same thing all 
over again. The gunners show no more ex- 
citement or emotion than rniners who are set- 
ting off blasts; the officers are as preoccupied 
with their mathematical calculations as though 
they were engineers building a railway. No 
one takes the slightest interest in what sue- 



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ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 147 

cess has attended their efforts; probably no 
one but the captain knows. Yet four or five 
or six miles away in the streets of that village 
whose church spire rises above the tree tops, 
or behind that screen of woods, or in the 
trenches which are on the other side of that 
hill, men are falling dead, or dying, or horribly 
wounded, beneath the fleecy patches which fol- 
low every crash of the guns. 

In the sketches of battles printed in the illus- 
trated papers, the sky is almost invariably 
filled with the white puffs which are bursting 
shrapnel. Now, that means either that the 
gunners are firing at dirigibles or aeroplanes, 
or, what is much more Hkely, that their gunnery 
is atrociously bad. A shell that bursts in the 
sky does no harm to any one. In theory, at 
least, shrapnel, to attain the maximum of 
deadliness, should burst at a height above the 
ground equivalent to three mills of the range — 
a mill being one thousandth of the distance. 
If, therefore, a battery is firing at, say, six 
thousand yards, the shells should burst eighteen 
yards above the ground. 

These false conceptions of modern warfare 
have resulted in creating a false picture of the 



148 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

type of soldiers that are wanted. What is 
wanted is ordinary men, trained to shoot and, 
above all else, trained to obey orders; men who 
can sit for days and nights in sodden clothing 
in sodden trenches, with indifferent and often 
insufficient food, waiting patiently, helplessly, 
for the death which may or may not come. 

Pit five hundred day-laborers — men who are 
accustomed to performing hard manual labor 
in all kinds of weather — against double that 
number of sportsmen and college men, and 
it is dollars to dimes that the laborers would 
win, not because they would be any braver, 
but because they would be accustomed to fa- 
tigue and privation and unending hard work, 
which, after all, is what this war consists of. 

After the German occupation of Brussels, 
the first engagement of sufficient magnitude 
to be termed a battle took place on August 
25 and 26 in the Sempst-Elewyt-Eppeghem- 
Vilvorde region, midway between Brussels and 
Malines. The Belgians had in action four 
divisions, totaling about eighty thousand men, 
opposed to which was a considerably heavier 
force of Germans. To get a clear conception 
of the battle one must picture a fifty-foot-high 







pq 



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ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 149 

railway embankment, its steeply sloping sides 
heavily wooded, stretching its length across a 
fertile, smiling countryside like a monstrous 
green snake. On this line, in time of peace, the 
bloc trains made the journey from Antwerp 
to Brussels in less than an hour. Malines, 
with its historic buildings and its famous 
cathedral, lies on one side of this line and the 
village of Vilvorde on the other, jfive miles 
separating them. On the 25th the Belgians, 
believing the Brussels garrison to have been 
seriously weakened and the German communi- 
cations poorly guarded, moved out in force 
from the shelter of the Antwerp forts and 
assumed a vigorous offensive. It was like a 
terrier attacking a bulldog. They drove the 
Germans from Malines by the very impetus of 
their attack, but the Germans brought up heavy 
reinforcements, and by the morning of the 
26th the Belgians were in a most perilous posi- 
tion. The battle which hinged on the posses- 
sion of the railway embankment gradually 
extended, each army trying to outflank the 
other, until it was being fought along a front 
of thirty miles. At dawn on the second day 
an artillery duel began across the embankment. 



ISO FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

the German fire being corrected by observers 
in captive balloons. By noon the Germans 
had gotten the range and a rain of shrapnel 
was bursting about the Belgian batteries, which 
limbered up and retired at a trot in perfect 
order. After the guns were out of range I 
could see the dark-blue masses of the support- 
ing Belgian infantry slowly falling back, cool 
as a winter's morning. Through an oversight, 
however, two battalions of Carabineers did not 
receive the order to retire and were in imminent 
danger of being cut off and destroyed. Then 
occurred one of the bravest acts that I have 
ever seen. To reach them a messenger would 
have to traverse a mile of open road, swept by 
shrieking shrapnel and raked by rifle fire. 
There was about one chance in a thousand of 
a man getting to the end of that road aHve. 
A colonel standing beside me under a railway 
culvert summoned a gendarme, gave him the 
necessary orders, and added, ^^ Bonne chance, 
mon brave.'' The man, a fierce-mustached 
fellow who would have gladdened the heart 
of Napoleon, knew that he was being sent into 
the jaws of death, but he merely saluted, set 
spurs to his horse, and tore down the road, 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 151 

an archaic figure in his towering bearskin. He 
reached the troops uninjured and gave the 
order for them to retreat, but as they fell back 
the German gunners got the range and with 
marvellous accuracy dropped shell after shell 
into the running column. Soon road and 
fields were dotted with corpses in Belgian 
blue. 

Time after time the Germans attempted to 
carry the railway embankment with the bayo- 
net, but the Belgians met them with blasts of 
lead which shrivelled the gray columns as 
leaves are shrivelled by an autumn wind. By 
mid-afternoon the Belgians and Germans were 
in places barely a hundred yards apart, and the 
rattle of musketry sounded like a boy drawing 
a stick along the palings of a picket-fence. 
During the height of the battle a Zeppelin 
slowly circled over the field like a great vulture 
awaiting a feast. So heavy was the fighting 
that the embankment of a branch railway 
from which I viewed the afternoon's battle 
was literally carpeted with the corpses of 
Germans who had been killed during the 
morning. One of them had died clasping a 
woman's picture. He was buried with it still 



152 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

clenched in his hand. I saw peasants throw 
a score of bodies into a single grave. One 
peasant would grasp a corpse by the shoulders 
and another would take its feet and they would 
give it a swing as though it were a sack of 
meal. As I watched these inanimate forms 
being carelessly tossed into the trench it was 
hard to make myself believe that only a few 
hours before they had been sons or husbands 
or fathers and that somewhere across the 
Rhine women and children were waiting and 
watching and praying for them. At a ham- 
let near Sempst I helped to bury an aged 
farmer and his son, inoffensive peasants, who 
had been executed by the Germans because a 
retreating Belgian soldier had shot a Uhlan in 
front of their farmhouse. Not content with 
shooting them, they had disfigured them almost 
beyond recognition. There were twenty-two 
bayonet wounds in the old man's face. I 
know, for I counted them. 

By four o'clock all the Belgian troops were 
withdrawn except a thin screen to cover the 
retreat. As I wished to see the German 
advance I remained on the railway embank- 
ment on the outskirts of Sempst after all the 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 153 

Belgians, save a picket of ten men, had been 
withdrawn from the village. I had my car 
waiting in the road below with the motor 
running. As the German infantry would 
have to advance across a mile of open fields it 
was obvious that I would have ample time 
in which to get away. The Germans prefaced 
their advance by a terrific cannonade. The 
air was filled with whining shrapnel. Farm- 
houses collapsed amid pufFs of brown smoke. 
The sky was smeared in a dozen places with 
the smoke of burning hamlets. Suddenly a 
soldier crouching beside me cried, '' Les Alle- 
mands ! Les Allemands I " and from the woods 
which screened the railway embankment burst 
a long line of gray figures, hoarsely cheering. 
At almost the same moment I heard a sudden 
splutter of shots in the village street behind 
me and my driver screamed, "Hurry for your 
life, monsieur! The Uhlans are upon us!" 
In my desire to see the main German advance 
it had never occurred to me that a force of the 
enemy's cavalry might slip around and take us 
in the flank, which was exactly what had 
happened. It was three hundred yards to the 
car and a freshly ploughed field lay between, 



154 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

but I am confident that I broke the world's 
record for the distance. As I leaped into the 
car and we shot down the road at fifty miles 
an hour, the Uhlans cantered into the village, 
the sunlight striking on their lance tips. It 
was a close call. 

The retreat from Malines provided a spec- 
tacle which I shall never forget. For twenty 
miles every road was jammed with clattering 
cavalry, plodding infantry, and rumbling bat- 
teries, the guns, limbers, and caissons still 
covered with the green boughs which had been 
used to mask their position from German 
aeroplanes. Gendarmes in giant bearskins, 
Chasseurs in uniforms of green and yellow. 
Carabineers with their shiny leather hats. 
Grenadiers, infantry of the line. Guides, Lancers, 
sappers and miners with picks and spades, 
engineers with pontoon wagons, machine guns 
drawn by dogs, ambulances with huge Red 
Cross flags fluttering above them, and cars, 
cars, cars, all the dear old famihar American 
makes among them, contributed to form a 
mighty river flowing Antwerpward. Malines 
formerly had a population of fifty thousand 
people, and forty-five thousand of these 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 155 

fled when they heard that the Germans were 
returning. The scenes along the road were 
heart-rending in their pathos. The very young 
and the very old, the rich and the well-to- 
do and the poverty-stricken, the lame and the 
sick and the blind, with the few belongings 
they had been able to save in sheet-wrapped 
bundles on their backs or piled in push-carts, 
clogged the roads and impeded the soldiery. 
These people were abandoning all that they 
held most dear to pillage and destruction. 
They were completely terrorized by the 
Germans. But the Belgian army was not 
terrorized. It was a retreating army but it 
was victorious in retreat. The soldiers were 
cool, confident, courageous, and gave me the 
feehng that if the German giant left himself 
unguarded a single instant little Belgium would 
drive home a solar-plexus blow. 

For many days after its evacuation by the 
Belgians, MaHnes occupied an unhappy position 
midway between the contending armies, being 
alternately bombarded by the Belgians and 
the Germans. The latter, instead of en- 
deavoring to avoid damaging the splendid 
cathedral, whose tower, three hundred and 



156 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

twenty-five feet high, is the most conspicuous 
landmark in the region, seemed to take a grim 
pleasure in directing their fire upon the ancient 
building. The great clock, the largest in 
Belgium, was destroyed; the famous stained- 
glass windows were broken; the exquisite 
carvings were shattered; and shells, crashing 
through the walls and roof, converted the 
beautiful interior into a heap of debris. As 
there were no Belgian troops in M alines at 
this time, and as this fact was perfectly well 
known to the Germans, this bombardment of 
an undefended city and the destruction of its 
historic monuments struck me as being pecu- 
liarly wanton and not induced by any military 
necessity. It was, of course, part and parcel 
of the German policy of terrorism and intimi- 
dation. The bombardment of cities, the 
destruction of historic monuments, the burning 
of villages, and, in many cases, the massacre of 
civilians was the price which the Belgians were 
forced to pay for resisting the invader. 

In order to ascertain just what damage had 
been done to the city, and particularly to the 
cathedral, I ran into MaHnes in my car during 
a pause in the bombardment. As the streets 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 157 

were too narrow to permit of turning the car 
around, and as it was more than probable that 
we should have to get out in a hurry, Roos 
suggested that we run in backward, which we 
did, I standing up in the tonneau, field-glasses 
glued to my eyes, on the lookout for lurking 
Germans. I don't recall ever having had a 
niore eerie experience than that surreptitious 
visit to Malines. The city was as silent and 
deserted as a cemetery; there was not a human 
being to be seen; and as we cautiously ad- 
vanced through the narrow, winding streets, 
the vacant houses echoed the throbbing of the 
motor with a racket which was positively 
startling. Just as we reached the square in 
front of the cathedral a German shell came 
shrieking over the housetops and burst with 
a shattering crash in the upper story of a 
building a few yards away. The whole front 
of that building came crashing down about us 
in a cascade of brick and plaster. We did not 
stay on the order of our going. No. We 
went out of that town faster than any auto- 
mobile ever went out of it before. We went 
so fast, in fact, that we struck and killed the 
only remaining inhabitant. He was a large 
yellow dog. 



iSS FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

CKving to strategic reasons the magnitude 
and significance of the great four days' battle 
which was fought in mid-September between 
the Belgian field army and the combined 
German forces in northern Belgium were care- 
fully masked in all official communications at 
the time, and, in the rush of later events, its 
importance was lost sight of. Yet the great 
flanking movement of the Allies in France 
largely owed its success to this determined 
offensive movement on the part of the Belgians, 
who, as it aftersvard proved, were acting in 
close co-operation with the French General 
Staff'. This unexpected sally, which took the 
Germans completely by surprise, not only 
compelled them to concentrate all their avail- 
able forces in Belgium, but, what was far more 
important, it necessitated the hasty recall of 
their Third and Ninth Armies, which were 
close to the French frontier and whose addition 
to the German battle-line in France might 
well have turned the scales in Germany's 
favor. In addition the Germans had to bring 
up their Landwehr and Landsturm regiments 
from the south of Brussels, and a naval division 
composed of fifteen thousand sailors and 
marines was also engaged. It is no exaggera- 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 159 

tion, then, to say that the success of the Allies 
on the Aisne was in great measure due to the 
sacrifices made on this occasion by the Belgian 
army. Every available man which the Germans 
could put into the field was used to hold a line 
running through Sempst, Weerde, Campen- 
hout, Wespelaer, Rotselaer, and Holsbeek. 
The Belgians lay to the northeast of this line, 
their left resting on Aerschot and their centre 
at Meerbeek. Between the opposing armies 
stretched the Malines-Louvain canal, along 
almost the entire length of which fighting as 
bloody as any in the war took place. 

To describe this battle — I do not even know 
by what name it will be known to future 
generations — would be to usurp the duties of 
the historian, and I shall only attempt, there- 
fore, to tell you of that portion of it which I 
saw with my own eyes. On the morning of 
September 13 four Belgian divisions moved 
southward from Malines, their objective being 
the town of Weerde, on the Antwerp-Brussels 
railway. It was known that the Germans 
occupied Weerde in force, so throughout the 
day the Belgian artillery, masked by heavy 
woods, pounded away incessantly at the town. 



i6o FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

By noon the enemy's guns ceased to reply, 
which was assumed by the jubilant Belgians to 
be a sign that the German artillery had been 
silenced. At noon the Belgian First Division 
moved forward and Thompson and I, leaving 
the car in front of a convent over which the 
Red Cross flag was flying, moved forward with 
it. Standing quite by itself in the middle of a 
field, perhaps a mile beyond the convent, 
was a two-story brick farmhouse. A hundred 
yards in front of the farmhouse stretched the 
raised, stone-paved, tree-lined highway which 
runs from Brussels to Antwerp, and on the 
other side of the highway was Weerde. Shel- 
tering ourselves as much as possible in the 
trenches which zigzagged across the field, and 
dashing at full speed across the open places 
which were swept by rifle fire, we succeeded 
in reaching the farmhouse. Ascending to the 
garret, we broke a hole through the tiled roof 
and found ourselves looking down upon the 
battle precisely as one looks down on a ball 
game from the upper tier of seats at the Polo 
Grounds. Lying in the deep ditch which bor- 
dered our side of the highway was a Belgian in- 
fantry brigade, composed of two regiments of 




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ON THE BELGIAN BArfLE-LINE i6i 

Carabineers and two regiments of Chasseurs a 
piedy the men all crouching in the ditch or ly- 
ing prone upon the ground, five hundred yards 
away, on the other side of the highway, we 
could see through the trees the whitewashed 
walls and red pottery roofs of Weerde, while 
a short distance to the right, in a heavily 
wooded park, was a large stone chateau. The 
only sign that the town was occupied was a 
pall of blue-gray vapor which hung over it 
and a continuous crackle of musketry coming 
from it, though occasionally, through my 
glasses, I could catch glimpses of the lean 
muzzles of machine guns protruding from the 
upper windows of the chateau. 

Now, you must bear in mind the fact that 
in this war soldiers fired from the trenches 
for days on end without once getting a glimpse 
of the enemy. They knew that somewhere 
opposite them, in that bit of wood, perhaps, or 
behind that group of buildings, or on the 
other side of that railway embankment, the 
enemy was trying to kill them just as earnestly 
as they were trying to kill him. But they 
rarely got a clear view of him save in street 
fighting and, of course, when he was advancing 



i62 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

across open country. Soldiers no longer select 
their man and pick him off as one would pick 
off a stag, because the great range of modern 
rifles has put the firing-lines too far apart for 
that sort of thing. Instead, therefore, of aim- 
ing at individuals, soldiers aim at the places 
where they believe those individuals to be. 
Each company commander shows his men their 
target, tells them at what distance to set their 
sights, and controls their expenditure of ammu- 
nition, the fire of infantry generally being more 
effective when delivered in bursts by sections. 

What I have said in general about infantry 
being unable to see the target at which they are 
firing was particularly true at Weerde owing to 
the dense foliage which served to screen the 
enemy's position. Occasionally, after the ex- 
plosion of a particularly well-placed Belgian 
shell, Thompson and I, from our hole in the 
roof and with the aid of our high-power glasses, 
could catch fleeting glimpses of scurrying gray- 
clad figures, but that was all. The men below 
us in the trenches could see nothing except 
the hedges, gardens, and red-roofed houses of 
a country town. They knew the enemy was 
there, however, from the incessant rattle of 




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ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 163 

musketry and machine guns and from the 
screams and exclamations of those of their 
fellows who happened to get in the bullets' 
way. 

Late in the afternoon word was passed down 
the line that the German guns had been 
put out of action, that the enemy was 
retiring, and that at 5.30 sharp the whole 
Belgian line would advance and take the 
town with the bayonet. Under cover of 
artillery fire so continuous that it sounded 
like thunder in the mountains, the Belgian 
infantry climbed out of the trenches and, 
throwing aside their knapsacks, formed up 
behind the road preparatory to the grand 
assault. A moment later a dozen dog batteries 
came trotting up and took position on the left 
of the infantry. At 5.30 to the minute the 
whistles of the officers sounded shrilly and the 
mile-long line of men swept forward cheering. 
They crossed the roadway, they scrambled 
over ditches, they climbed fences, they pushed 
through hedges, until they were within a 
hundred yards of the line of buildings which 
formed the outskirts of the town. Then hell 
itself broke loose. The whole German front. 



i64 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

which for several hours past had replied but 
feebly to the Belgian fire, spat a continuous 
stream of lead and flame. The rolling crash 
of musketry and the ripping snarl of machine 
guns were stabbed by the vicious pom-pom-pom^ 
pom-pom of the quick-firers. From every 
window of the three-storied chateau opposite 
us the lean muzzles of mitrailleuses poured out 
their hail of death. I have seen fighting on 
four continents, but I have never witnessed 
so deadly a fire as that which wiped out the 
head of the Belgian column as a sponge wipes 
out figures on a slate. 

The Germans had prepared a trap and the 
Belgians had walked — or rather charged — 
directly into it. Three minutes later the dog 
batteries came tearing back on a dead run. 
That should have been a signal that it was 
high time for us to go, but, in spite of the fact 
that a storm was brewing, we waited to see 
the ninth inning. Then things began to 
happen with a rapidity that was bewildering. 
Back through the hedges, across the ditches, 
over the roadway came the Belgian infantry, 
crouching, stooping, running for their lives. 
Every now and then a soldier would stumble. 




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ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 165 

as though he had stubbed his toe, and throw 
out his arms and fall headlong. The road 
was sprinkled with silent forms in blue and 
green. The fields were sprinkled with them 
too. One man was hit as he was strug- 
gling to get through a hedge and died stand- 
ing, held upright by the thorny branches. Men 
with blood streaming down their faces, men 
with horrid crimson patches on their tunics, 
limped, crawled, staggered past, leaving scarlet 
trails behind them. A young officer of Chas- 
seurs, who had been recklessly exposing himself 
while trying to check the retreat of his men, 
suddenly spun around on his heels, like one of 
those wooden toys which the curb venders sell, 
and then crumpled up, as though all the bone 
and muscle had gone out of him. A man 
plunged into a half-filled ditch and lay there, 
with his head under water. I could see the 
water slowly redden. 

Bullets began to smash the tiles above us. 
"This is no place for two innocent little 
American boys," remarked Thompson, shoul- 
dering his camera. I agreed with him. By 
the time we reached the ground the Belgian 
infantry was half a mile in our rear, and to 



i66 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

reach the car we had to cross nearly a mile of 
open field. Bullets were singing across it and 
kicking up little spurts of brown earth where 
they struck. We had not gone a hundred 
yards when the German artillery, which the 
Belgians so confidently asserted had been 
silenced, opened with shrapnel. Have you 
ever heard a winter gale howling and shriek- 
ing through the tree tops ? Of course. Then 
you know what shrapnel sounds like, only it is 
louder. You have no idea though how ex- 
tremely annoying shrapnel is, when it bursts 
in your immediate vicinity. You feel as 
though you would like nothing in the world 
so much as to be suddenly transformed into a 
woodchuck and have a convenient hole. I 
remembered that an artillery officer had told 
me that a burst of shrapnel from a battery 
two miles away will spread itself over an eight- 
acre field, and every time I heard the moan 
of an approaching shell I wondered if it would 
decide to explode in the particular eight-acre 
field in which I happened to be. 

As though the German shell storm was not 
making things sufficiently uncomfortable for 
us, when we were half-way across the field 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 167 

two Belgian soldiers suddenly rose from a 
trench and covered us with their rifles. "Halt ! 
Hands up !" they shouted. There was nothing 
for it but to obey them. We advanced with 
our hands in the air but with our heads twisted 
upward on the lookout for shrapnel. As we 
approached they recognized us. "Oh, you're 
the Americans," said one of them, lowering 
his rifle. "We couldn't see your faces and 
we took you for Germans. You'd better 
come with us. It's getting too hot to stay 
here." The four of us started on a run for a 
little cluster of houses a few hundred yards 
away. By this time the shells were coming 
across at the rate of twenty a minute. "Sup- 
pose we go into a cellar until the storm blows 
over," suggested Roos, who had joined us. 
"I'm all for that," said I, making a dive for 
the nearest doorway. "Keep away from that 
house!" shouted a Belgian soldier who sud- 
denly appeared from around a corner. "The 
man who owns it has gone insane from fright. 
He's up-stairs with a rifle and he's shooting at 
every one who passes." "Well, I call that 
damned inhospitable," said Thompson, and 
Roos and I heartily agreed with him. There 



i68 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

was nothing else for it, therefore, but to make 
a dash for the car. We had left it standing 
in front of a convent over which a Red Cross 
flag was flying on the assumption that there it 
would be perfectly safe. But we found that 
we were mistaken. The Red Cross flag did 
not spell protection by any means. As we 
came within sight of the car a shell burst 
within thirty feet of it, a fragment of the 
projectile burying itself in the door. I never 
knew of a car taking so long to crank. Though 
it was really probably only a matter of seconds 
before the engine started it seemed to us, 
standing in that shell-swept road, like hours. 
Darkness had now fallen. A torrential rain 
had set in. The car slid from one side of the 
road to the other like a Scotchman coming 
home from celebrating Bobbie Burns*s birth- 
day and repeatedly threatened to capsize in 
the ditch. The mud was ankle-deep and the 
road back to Malines was now in the possession 
of the Germans, so we were compelled to make 
a detour through a deserted countryside, 
running through the inky blackness without 
lights so as not to invite a visit from a shell. 
It was long after midnight when, cold, wet. 



ON THE BELGIAN BATTLE-LINE 169 

and famished, we called the password to the 
sentry at the gateway through the barbed-wire 
entanglements which encircled Antwerp and 
he let us in. It was a very lively day for 
every one concerned and there were a few 
minutes when I thought that I would never 
see the Statue of Liberty again. 



VII 
THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 

IMAGINE, if you please, a professional 
heavyweight prize-fighter, with an ab- 
normally long reach, holding an ama- 
teur bantam-weight boxer at arm's length 
with one hand and hitting him when and 
where he pleased with the other. The fact 
that the little man was not in the least afraid 
of his burly antagonist and that he got in a 
vicious kick or jab whenever he saw an opening 
would not, of course, have any effect on the 
outcome of the unequal contest. Now that 
is almost precisely what happened when the 
Germans besieged Antwerp, the enormously 
superior range and caliber of their siege-guns 
enabling them to pound the city's defences to 
pieces at their leisure without the defenders 
being able to offer any effective resistance^ 

Though Antwerp was to all intents and 
purposes a besieged city for many weeks prior 
to its capture, it was not until the beginning 

of the last week in September that the Germans 

170 



THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 171 

seriously set to work destroying its forti- 
fications. When they did begin, however, 
their great siege-pieces pounded the forts as 
steadily and remorselessly as a trip-hammer 
pounds a bar of iron. At the time the Belgian 
General Staff believed that the Germans were 
using the same giant howitzers which demol- 
ished the forts at Liege, but in this they were 
mistaken, for, as it transpired later, the Antwerp 
fortifications owed their destruction to Aus- 
trian guns served by Austrian artillerymen. 
Now, guns of this size can only be fired from 
specially prepared concrete beds, and these 
beds, as we afterward learned, had been built 
during the preceding month behind the em- 
bankment of the railway which runs from 
Malines to Louvain, thus accounting for the 
tenacity with which the Germans had held 
this railway despite repeated attempts to dis- 
lodge them. At this stage of the investment 
the Germans were firing at a range of upwards 
of eight miles, while the Belgians had no 
artillery that was effective at more than six. 
Add to this the fact that the German fire was 
remarkably accurate, being controlled and 
constantly corrected by observers stationed in 



172 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

balloons, and that the German shells were 
loaded with an explosive having greater destruc- 
tive properties than either cordite or shimose 
powder, and it will be seen how hopeless was 
the Belgian position. 

The scenes along the Lierre-St. Catherine- 
Waelhem sector, against which the Germans 
at first focussed their attack, were impressive 
and awesome beyond description. Against a 
livid sky rose pillars of smoke from burning 
villages. The air was filled with shrieking 
shell and bursting shrapnel. The deep- 
mouthed roar of the guns in the forts and the 
angry bark of the Belgian field-batteries were 
answered at intervals by the shattering crash 
of the German high-explosive shells. When 
one of these big shells — the soldiers dubbed 
them *' Antwerp expresses" — struck in a field 
it sent up a geyser of earth two hundred feet 
in height. When they dropped in a river or 
canal, as sometimes happened, there was a 
waterspout. And when they dropped in a 
village, that village disappeared from the map. 

While we were watching the bombardment 
from a rise in the Waelhem road a shell burst 
in the hamlet of Waerloos, whose red-brick 



THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 173 

houses were clustered almost at our feet. A 
few minutes later a procession of fugitive 
villagers came plodding up the cobble-paved 
highway. It was headed by an ashen-faced 
peasant pushing a wheelbarrow with a weeping 
woman cHnging to his arm. In the wheel- 
barrow, atop a pile of hastily collected house- 
hold goods, was sprawled the body of a little 
boy. He could not have been more than 
seven. His little knickerbockered legs and 
play-worn shoes protruded grotesquely from 
beneath a heap of bedding. When they lifted 
it we could see where the shell had hit him. 
Beside the dead boy sat his sister, a tot of 
three, with blood trickling from a flesh-wound 
in her face. She was still clinging convulsively 
to a toy lamb which had once been white but 
whose fleece was now turned to crimson. 
Some one passed round a hat and we awkwardly 
tried to express our sympathy through the 
medium of silver. After a little pause they 
started on again, the father stolidly pushing 
the wheelbarrow, with its pathetic load, 
before him. It was the only home that family 
had. 
One of the bravest acts that I have ever 



174 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

seen was performed by an American woman 
during the bombardment of Waelhem. Her 
name was Mrs. Winterbottom; she was origi- 
nally from Boston, and had married an English 
army officer. When he went to the front in 
France she went to the front in Belgium, 
bringing over her car, which she drove herself, 
and placing it at the disposal of the British 
Field Hospital. After the fort of Waelhem 
had been silenced and such of the garrison as 
were able to move had been withdrawn, word 
was received at ambulance headquarters that 
a number of dangerously wounded had been 
left behind and that they would die unless 
they received immediate attention. To reach 
the fort it was necessary to traverse nearly 
two miles of road swept by shell-fire. Before 
any one realized what was happening a big 
gray car shot down the road with the slender 
figure of Mrs. Winterbottom at the wheel. 
Clinging to the running-board was her English 
chauffeur and beside her sat my little Kansas 
photographer, Donald Thompson. Though 
the air was filled with the fleecy white patches 
which look like cotton-wool but are really burst- 
ing shrapnel, Thompson told me afterward 




'In a wheelbarrow was sprawled, the body of a little boy. 
He could not have been more than seven. We could 
see where the shell had hit him. Beside the dead boy 
sat his sister, a tot of three, with blood trickling from 
a flesh-wound in her face." 



THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 175 

that Mrs. Winterbottom was as cool as 
though she were driving down her native 
Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning. 
When they reached the fort shells were falling 
all about them, but they filled the car with 
wounded men and Mrs. Winterbottom started 
back with her blood-soaked freight for the 
Belgian lines. 

Thompson remained in the fort to take 
pictures. When darkness fell he made his way 
back to the village of Waelhem, where he found 
a regiment of Belgian infantry. In one of 
the soldiers Thompson recognized a man who, 
before the war, had been a waiter in the 
St. Regis Hotel in New York and who had 
been detailed to act as his guide and interpreter 
during the fighting before Termonde. This 
man took Thompson into a wine-shop where a 
detachment of soldiers was quartered, gave him 
food, and spread straw upon the floor for him 
to sleep on. Shortly after midnight a forty- 
two centimetre shell struck the building. Of 
the soldiers who were sleeping in the same 
room as Thompson nine were killed and fifteen 
more who were sleeping up-stairs, the ex-waiter 
among them. Thompson told me that when 



176 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

the ceiling gave way and the mangled corpses 
came tumbling down upon him, he ran up the 
street with his hands above his head, scream- 
ing like a madman. He met an officer whom 
he knew and they ran down the street 
together, hoping to get out of the doomed 
town. Just then a projectile from one of the 
German siege-guns tore down the long, straight 
street, a few yards above their heads. The 
blast of air which it created was so terrific 
that it threw them down. Thompson said 
that it was like standing close to the edge of 
the platform at a wayside station when the 
Empire State Express goes by. When his 
nerve came back to him he pulled a couple of 
cigars out of his pocket and offered one to the 
officer. Their hands trembled so, he said 
afterward, that they used up half a box of 
matches before they could get their cigars 
lighted. 

I am inclined to think that the most bizarre 
incident I saw during the bombardment of 
the outer forts was the flight of the women 
inmates of a madhouse at Duffel. There were 
three hundred women in the institution, many 
of them violently insane, and the nuns in 



THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 177 

charge, assisted by soldiers, had to take them 
across a mile of open country, under a rain of 
shells, to a waiting train. I shall not soon for- 
get the picture of that straggling procession 
winding its slow way across the stubble-covered 
fields. Every few seconds a shell would burst 
above it or in front of it or behind it with a 
deafening explosion. Yet, despite the frantic 
efforts of the nuns and soldiers, the women 
would not be hurried. When a shell burst 
some of them would scream and cower or start 
to run, but more of them would stop in their 
tracks and gibber and laugh and clap their 
hands like excited children. Then the soldiers 
would curse under their breath and push them 
roughly forward and the nuns would plead 
with them in their soft, low voices, to hurry, 
hurry, hurry. We, who were watching the 
scene, thought that few of them would reach 
the train alive, yet not one was killed or 
wounded. The Arabs are right: the mad are 
under God's protection. 

One of the most inspiring features of the 
campaign in Belgium was the heroism displayed 
by the priests and the members of the religious 
orders. Village cures in their black cassocks 



178 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

and shovel hats, and monks in sandals and 
brown woollen robes were everywhere. I saw 
them in the trenches exhorting the soldiers to 
fight to the last for God and the King; I saw 
them going out on to the battle-field with 
stretchers to gather the wounded under a fire 
which made veterans seek shelter; 1 saw them 
in the villages where the big shells were falling, 
helping to carry away the ill and the aged; 
I saw them in the hospitals taking farewell 
messages and administering the last sacrament 
to the dying; I even saw them, rifle in hand, 
on the firing-line, fighting for the existence 
of the nation. To these soldiers of the Lord 
I raise my hat in respect and admiration. The 
people of Belgium owe them a debt that they 
can never repay. 

In the days before the war it was commonly 
said that the Church was losing ground in 
Belgium; that religion was gradually being 
ousted by socialism. If this were so, I saw no 
sign of it in the nation's days of trial. Time 
and time again I saw soldiers before going into 
battle drop on their knees and cross themselves 
and murmur a hasty prayer. Even the throngs 
of terrified fugitives, flying from their burning 



THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 179 

villages, would pause in their flight to kneel 
before the little shrines along the wayside. 
I am convinced, indeed, that the ruthless 
destruction of religious edifices by the Germans 
and the brutality which they displayed toward 
priests and members of the religious orders 
were more responsible than any one thing for 
the desperate resistance which they met with 
from the Belgian peasantry. 

By the afternoon of October 3 things were 
looking very black for Antwerp. The forts 
composing the Lierre-Waelhem sector of the 
outer line of defences had been pounded into 
silence by the German siege-guns; a strong 
German force, pushing through the breach 
thus made, had succeeded in crossing the 
Nethe in the face of desperate opposition; 
the Belgian troops, after a fortnight of con- 
tinuous fighting, were at the point of exhaus- 
tion; the hospitals were swamped by the 
streams of wounded which for days past had 
been pouring in; over the city hung a cloud 
of despondency and gloom, for the people, 
though kept in complete ignorance of the true 
state of affairs, seemed oppressed with a sense 
of impending disaster. 



i8o FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

When I returned that evening to the Hotel 
St. Antoine from the battle front, which was 
then barely half a dozen miles outside the city, 
the manager stopped me as I was entering the 
lift. 

"Are you leaving with the others, Mr. 
Powell?" he whispered. 

"Leaving for where? With what others?" 
I asked sharply. 

"Hadn't you heard?" he answered in some 
confusion. "The members of the Govern- 
ment and the diplomatic corps are leaving 
for Ostend by special steamer at seven in the 
morning. It has just been decided at a Cabinet 
meeting. But don't mention it to a soul. 
No one is to know it until they are safely gone." 

I remember that as I continued to my room 
the corridors smelled of smoke, and upon 
inquiring its cause I learned that the British 
Minister, Sir Francis Villiers, and his secre- 
taries were burning papers in the rooms occu- 
pied by the British Legation. The Russian 
Minister, who was superintending the packing 
of his trunks in the hall, stopped me to say 
good-by. Imagine my surprise, then, upon go- 
ing down to breakfast the following morning. 




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THE COMING OF THE BRITISH i8r 

to meet Count Goblet d'Alviella, the Vice- 
President of the Senate and a Minister of State, 
leaving the dining-room. 

"Why, Count!" I exclaimed, "I had sup- 
posed that you were well on your way to Ostend 
by this time." 

. "We had expected to be," explained the 
venerable statesman, "but at four o'clock this 
morning the British Minister sent us word 
that Winston Churchill had started for Ant- 
werp and asking us to wait and hear what he 
has to say." 

At one o'clock that afternoon a big drab- 
colored touring-car filled with British naval 
officers tore up the Place de Meir, its horn 
sounding a hoarse warning, took the turn into 
the narrow Marche aux Souliers on two 
wheels, and drew up in front of the hotel. 
Before the car had fairly come to a stop the 
door of the tonneau was thrown violently open 
and out jumped a smooth-faced, sandy-haired, 
stoop-shouldered, youthful-looking man in 
the undress Trinity House uniform. There 
was no mistaking who it was. It was 
the Right Hon. Winston Churchill. As he 
darted into the crowded lobby, which, as 



1 82 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

usual at the luncheon hour, was filled with 
Belgian, French, and British stafF-officers, di- 
plomatists. Cabinet Ministers, and correspond- 
ents, he flung his arms out in a nervous, char- 
acteristic gesture, as though pushing his way- 
through a crowd. It was a most spectacular 
entrance and reminded me for all the world 
of a scene in a melodrama where the hero 
dashes up, bareheaded, on a foam-flecked 
horse, and saves the heroine or the old home- 
stead or the family fortune, as the case may 
be. 

While lunching with Sir Francis Villiers and 
the staff of the British Legation, two English 
correspondents approached and asked Mr. 
Churchill for an interview. 

"I will not talk to you," he almost shouted, 
bringing his fist down upon the table. "You 
have no business to be in Belgium at this time. 
Get out of the country at once." 

It happened that my table was so close 
that I could not help but overhear the request 
and the response, and I remember remark- 
ing to the friends who were dining with me: 
"Had Mr. Churchill said that to me, I should 
have answered him, *I have as much business 



THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 183 

in Belgium at this time, sir, as you had in 
Cuba during the Spanish-American War.'" 

An hour later I was standing in the lobby 
talking to M. de Vos, the burgomaster of 
Antwerp, M. Louis Franck, the Antwerp 
member of the Chamber of Deputies, Ameri- 
can Consul-General Diederich and Vice-Consul- 
General Sherman, when Mr. Churchill rushed 
past us on his way to his room. He impressed 
one as being always in a tearing hurry. The 
burgomaster stopped him, introduced himself, 
and expressed his anxiety regarding the fate 
of the city. Before he had finished Churchill 
was part-way up the stairs. 

"I think everything will be all right now, 
Mr. Burgomaster," he called down in a voice 
which could be distinctly heard throughout 
the lobby. "You needn't worry. We're go- 
ing to save the city." 

Whereupon most of the civilians present 
heaved sighs of relief. They felt that a real 
sailor had taken the wheel. Those of us who 
were conversant with the situation were also 
relieved because we took it for granted that 
Mr. Churchill would not have made so con- 
fident and public an assertion unless ample 



1 84 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

reinforcements in men and guns were on the 
way. Even then the words of this energetic, 
impetuous young man did not entirely reassure 
me, for from the windows of my room I could 
hear the German guns quite plainly. They 
had come appreciably nearer. 

That afternoon and the three days following 
Mr. Churchill spent in inspecting the Belgian 
position. He repeatedly exposed himself upon 
the firing-line and on one occasion, near Wael- 
hem, had a rather narrow escape from a burst 
of shrapnel. For some unexplainable reason 
the British censorship cast a veil of profound 
secrecy over Mr. Churchill's visit to Antwerp. 
The story of his arrival, just as I have related 
it above, I telegraphed that same night to the 
New York World, yet it never got through, 
nor did any of the other despatches which I 
sent during his four days' visit. In fact, it 
was not until after Antwerp had fallen that 
the British pubHc was permitted to learn that 
the Sea Lord had been in Belgium. 

Had it not been for the promises of rein- 
forcements given to the King and the Cabinet 
by Mr. Churchill, there is no doubt that the 
Government would have departed for Ostend 




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THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 185 

when originally planned and that the inhabi- 
tants of Antwerp, thus warned of the extreme 
gravity of the situation, would have had ample 
time to leave the city with a semblance of 
comfort and order, for the railways leading to 
Ghent and to the Dutch frontier were still in 
operation and the highways were then not 
blocked by a retreating army. 

The first of the promised reinforcements 
arrived on Sunday evening by special train 
from Ostend. They consisted of a brigade of 
the Royal Marines, perhaps two thousand men 
in all, well-drilled and well-armed, and several 
heavy guns. They were rushed to the southern 
front and immediately sent into the trenches 
to relieve the worn-out Belgians. On Monday 
and Tuesday the balance of the British expe- 
ditionary force, consisting of between five and 
six thousand men of the Volunteer Naval 
Reserve, arrived from the coast, their ammuni- 
tion and supplies being brought by road, via 
Bruges and Ghent, in London motor-'buses. 
When this procession of lumbering vehicles, 
placarded with advertisements of teas, tobaccos, 
whiskeys, and current theatrical attractions 
and bearing the signs "Bank,'' "Holborn," 



i86 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

** Piccadilly/' "Shepherd's Bush," "Strand," 
rumbled through the streets of Antwerp, the 
populace went mad. The British had come at 
last ! The city was saved ! '^Five les Anglais! 
Vive Tommy Atkins!" 

I witnessed the detrainment of the naval 
brigades at Vieux Dieu and accompanied them 
to the trenches north of Lierre. As they 
tramped down the tree-bordered, cobble- 
paved highroad, we heard, for the first time 
in Belgium, the lilting refrain of that music- 
hall ballad which had become the English 
soldiers' marching song: 

" It^s a long way to Tipperary, 

It's a long way to go ; 
Ifs a long way to Tipperary — 

To the sweetest girl I know ! 
Good-hy, Piccadilly ! 

Farewell, Leicester Square ! 
It's a long, long way to Tipperary ; 

But my heart's right there ! " 

Many and many a one of the light-hearted lads 
with whom I marched down the Lierre road 
on that October afternoon were destined never 
again to feel beneath their feet the flags of 




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THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 187 

Piccadilly, never again to lounge in Leicester 
Square. 

They were as clean-limbed, pleasant-faced, 
wholesome-looking a lot of young Englishmen 
as you would find anywhere, but to any one 
who had had military experience it was evident 
that, despite the fact that they were vigorous 
and courageous and determined to do their 
best, they were not "first-class fighting men." 
To win in war, as in the prize-ring, something 
more than vigor and courage and determina- 
tion are required; to those qualities must be 
added experience and training, and experience 
and training were precisely what those naval 
reservists lacked. Moreover, their equipment 
left much to be desired. For example, only 
a very small proportion had pouches to carry 
the regulation one hundred and fifty rounds. 
They were, in fact, equipped very much as 
many of the American militia organizations 
were equipped when suddenly called out for 
strike duty in the days before the reorgani- 
zation of the National Guard. Even the 
officers — those, at least, with whom I talked 
— seemed to be as deficient in field experience 
as the m.en. Yet these raw troops were 



1 88 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

rushed into trenches which were in most cases 
unprotected by head covers, and, though un- 
supported by effective artillery, they held those 
trenches for three days under as murderous a 
shell fire as I have ever seen and then fell back 
in perfect order. What the losses of the Naval 
Division were I do not know. In Antwerp it 
was generally understood that very close to a 
fifth of the entire force was killed or wounded — 
upwards of three hundred cases were, I was told, 
treated in one hospital alone — and the British 
Government officially announced that sixteen 
hundred were forced across the frontier and 
interned in Holland. 

No small part in the defence of the city 
was played by the much-talked-about armored 
train, which was built under the supervision 
of Lieutenant-Commander Littlejohn in the 
yards of the Antwerp Engineering Company 
at Hoboken. The train consisted of four 
large coal trucks with sides of armor-plate 
sufficiently high to afford protection to the 
crews of the 4.7 naval guns — six of which were 
brought from England for the purpose, though 
there was only time to mount four of them — 
and between each gun truck was a heavily 



THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 189 

armored baggage-car for ammunition, the 
whole being drawn by a small locomotive, 
also steel-protected. The guns were served 
by Belgian artillerymen commanded by British 
gunners and each gun truck carried, in addition, 
a detachment of infantry in the event of the 
enemy getting to close quarters. Personally, 
1 am inclined to believe that the chief value 
of this novel contrivance lay in the moral 
encouragement it lent to the defence, for its 
guns, though more powerful, certainly, than 
anything that the Belgians possessed, were 
wholly outclassed, both in range and caliber, 
by the German artillery. The German officers 
whom I questioned on the subject after the 
occupation told me that the fire of the armored 
train caused them no serious concern and did 
comparatively little damage. 

By Tuesday night a boy scout could have 
seen that the position of Antwerp was hope- 
less. The Austrian siege-guns had smashed 
and silenced the chain of supposedly impreg- 
nable forts to the south of the city with the 
same businesslike despatch with which the 
same type of guns had smashed and silenced 
those other supposedly impregnable forts at 



190 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

Liege and Namur. Through the opening 
thus made a German army corps had poured 
to fling itself against the second Hne of defence, 
formed by the Ruppel and the Nethe. Across 
the Nethe, under cover of a terrific artillery 
fire, the Germans threw their pontoon bridges, 
and when the first bridges were destroyed by 
the Belgian guns they built others, and when 
these were destroyed in turn they tried again, 
and at the third attempt they succeeded. With 
the helmeted legions once across the river, it 
was all over but the shouting, and no one knew 
it better than the Belgians, yet, heartened by 
the presence of the little handful of English, they 
fought desperately, doggedly on. Their forts 
pounded to pieces by guns which they could not 
answer, their ranks thinned by a murderous rain 
of shot and shell, the men heavy-footed and 
heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, the horses 
staggering from exhaustion, the ambulance 
service broken down, the hospitals helpless 
before the flood of wounded, the trenches 
littered with the dead and dying, they still held 
back the German legions. 

By this time the region to the south 
of Antwerp had been transformed from a 




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THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 191 

peaceful, smiling countryside into a land of 
death and desolation. It looked as though it 
had been swept by a great hurricane, filled 
with lightning which had missed nothing. 
The blackened walls of what had once been 
prosperous farmhouses, haystacks turned into 
heaps of smoking carbon, fields slashed across 
with trenches, roads rutted and broken by the 
great wheels of guns and transport wagons— 
these scenes were on every hand. In the towns 
and villages along the Nethe, where the 
fighting was heaviest, the walls of houses had 
fallen into the streets and piles of furniture, 
mattresses, agricultural machinery, and farm 
carts showed where the barricades and machine 
guns had been. The windows of many of the 
houses were stuffed with mattresses and pillows, 
behind which the riflemen had made a stand. 
Lierre and Waelhem and Dufi^el were like 
sieves dripping blood. Corpses were strewn 
everywhere. Some of the dead were spread- 
eagled on their backs as though exhausted after 
a long march, some were twisted and crumpled 
in attitudes grotesque and horrible, some were 
propped up against the walls of houses to 
which they had tried to crawl in their agony. 



192 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

All of them stared at nothing with awful, 
unseeing eyes. It was one of the scenes that 
I should like to forget. But I never can. 

On Tuesday evening General de Guise, the 
military Governor of Antwerp, informed the 
Government that the Belgian position was 
fast becoming untenable and, acting on this 
information, the capital of Belgium was trans- 
ferred from Antwerp to Ostend, the members 
of the Government and the diplomatic corps 
leaving at daybreak on Wednesday by special 
steamer, while at the same time Mr. Winston 
Churchill departed for the coast by auto- 
mobile under convoy of an armored motor- 
car. His last act was to order the destruction 
of the condensers of the German vessels in 
the harbor, for which the Germans, upon 
occupying the city, demanded an indemnity 
of twenty million francs. 

As late as Wednesday morning the great 
majority of the inhabitants of Antwerp re- 
mained in total ignorance of the real state of 
affairs. Morning after morning the Matin 
and the Metropole had published official com- 
muniques categorically denying that any of the 
forts had been silenced and asserting in the 




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THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 195 

most positive terms that the enemy was being 
held in check all along the line. As a result 
of tl is policy of denial and deception, the 
peop.e of Antwerp went to sleep on Tuesday 
night calmly confident that in a few days more 
the Germans would raise the siege from sheer 
discouragement and depart. Imagine what 
happened, then, when they awoke on Wednes- 
day morning, October 7, to learn that the 
Government had stolen away between two 
days without issuing so much as a word of 
warning, and to find staring at them from 
every wall and hoarding proclamations signed 
by the military Governor announcing that the 
bombardment of the city was imminent, urging 
all who were able to leave instantly, and 
advising those who remained to shelter them- 
selves behind sand-bags in their cellars. It 
was like waiting until the entire first floor of a 
house was in flames and the occupants' means 
of escape almost cut off, before shouting 

r ire ! 

No one who witnessed the exodus of the 
population from Antwerp will ever forget it. 
No words can adequately describe it. It was 
not a flight; it was a stampede. The sober> 



194 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

slow-moving, slow-thinking Flemish towns- 
people were suddenly transformed into a herd 
of terror-stricken cattle. So complete was 
the German enveloping movement that only 
three avenues of escape remained open: west- 
ward, through St. Nicolas and Lokeren, to 
Ghent; northeastward across the frontier 
into Holland; down the Scheldt toward 
Flushing. Of the five hundred thousand 
fugitives — for the exodus was not confined to 
the citizens of Antwerp but included the 
entire population of the countryside for 
twenty miles around — probably fully a quarter 
of a million escaped by river. Anything that 
could float was pressed into service: merchant 
steamers, dredgers, ferry-boats, scows, barges, 
canal-boats, tugs, fishing craft, yachts, rowing 
boats, launches, even extemporized rafts. There 
was no attempt to enforce order. The fear- 
frantic people piled aboard until there was 
not even standing-room on the vessels' decks. 
Of all these thousands who fled by river, but 
an insignificant proportion were provided with 
food or warm clothing or had space in which 
to lie down. Yet through two nights they 
huddled together on the open decks in the 




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THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 195 

cold and the darkness while the great guns 
tore to pieces the city they had left behind 
them. As I passed up the crowded river in 
my launch on the morning after the first 
night's bombardment we seemed to be followed 
by a wave of sound — a great murmur of min- 
gled anguish and misery and fatigue and hun- 
ger from the homeless thousands adrift upon 
the waters. 

The scenes along the highways were even 
more appalling, for here the retreating soldiery 
and the fugitive civilians were mixed in in- 
extricable confusion. By mid-afternoon on 
Wednesday the road from Antwerp to Ghent, 
a distance of forty miles, was a solid mass of 
refugees, and the same was true of every road, 
every lane, every footpath leading in a westerly 
or a northerly direction. The people fled in 
motor-cars and in carriages, in delivery wagons, 
in moving vans, in farm carts, in omnibuses, 
in vehicles drawn by oxen, by donkeys, even by 
cows, on horseback, on bicycles, and there 
were thousands upon thousands afoot. I saw 
men trundling wheelbarrows piled high with 
bedding and with their children perched upon 
the bedding. I saw sturdy young peasants 



196 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

carrying their aged parents in their arms. 
I saw women of fashion in fur coats and high- 
heeled shoes staggering along clinging to the 
rails of the caissons or to the ends of wagons. 
I saw white-haired men and women grasping 
the harness of the gun teams or the stirrup- 
leathers of the troopers, who, themselves 
exhausted from many days of fighting, slept 
in their saddles as they rode. I saw springless 
farm wagons literally heaped with wounded 
soldiers with piteous white faces; the bottoms 
of the wagons leaked and left a trail of blood 
behind them. A very old priest, too feeble to 
walk, was trundled by two young priests in a 
hand-cart. A young woman, an expectant 
mother, was tenderly and anxiously helped on 
by her husband. One of the saddest features 
of all this dreadful procession was the soldiers, 
many of them wounded, and so bent with 
fatigue from many days of marching and fight- 
ing that they could hardly raise their feet. 
One infantryman who could bear his boots no 
longer had tied them to the cleaning-rod of 
his rifle. Another had strapped his boots to 
his cowhide knapsack and limped forward with 
his swollen feet in felt slippers. Here were 



THE COMING OF THE BRITISH 197 

a group of Capuchin monks abandoning 
their monastery; there a little party of 
white-faced nuns shepherding the flock of war- 
orphaned children who had been intrusted 
to their care. The confusion was beyond all 
imagination, the clamour deafening: the rattle 
of wheels, the throbbing of motors, the clatter 
of hoofs, the cracking of whips, the curses of 
the drivers, the groans of the wounded, the cries 
of women, the whimpering of children, threats, 
pleadings, oaths, screams, imprecations, and al- 
ways the monotonous shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of 
countless weary feet. 

The fields and the ditches between which these 
processions of disaster passed were strewn with 
the prostrate forms of those who, from sheer 
exhaustion, could go no farther. And there was 
no food for them, no shelter. Within a few hours 
after the exodus began the countryside was 
as bare of food as the Sahara is of grass. Time 
after time I saw famished fugitives pause at 
farmhouses and offer all of their pitifully few 
belongings for a loaf of bread; but the kind- 
hearted country people, with tears streaming 
down their cheeks, could only shake their 
heads and tell them that they had long since 



198 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

given all their food away. Old men and 
fashionably gowned women and wounded 
soldiers went out into the fields and pulled up 
turnips and devoured them raw — for there was 
nothing else to eat. During a single night, 
near a small town on the Dutch frontier, 
twenty women gave birth to children in the 
open fields. No one will ever know how 
many people perished during that awful 
flight from hunger and exposure and exhaus- 
tion; many more, certainly, than lost their 
lives in the bombardment. 



VIII 
THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

THE bombardment of Antwerp began 
about ten o'clock on the evening of 
Wednesday, October 7. The first 
shell to fall within the city struck a house in 
the Berchem district, killing a fourteen-year-old 
boy and wounding his mother and little sister. 
The second decapitated a street-sweeper as 
he was running for shelter. Throughout the 
night the rain of death continued without 
cessation, the shells falling at the rate of four 
or five a minute. The streets of the city were 
as deserted as those of Pompeii. The few 
people who remained, either because they 
were willing to take their chances or because 
they had no means of getting away, were 
cowering in their cellars. Though the gas 
and electric lights were out, the sky was rosy 
from the reflection of the petrol-tanks which 
the Belgians had set on fire; now and then 
a shell would burst with the intensity of mag- 
nesium, and the quivering beams of two search- 
lights on the forts across the river still further lit 

199 



200 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

up the ghastly scene. The noise was deafening. 
The buildings seemed to rock and sway. The 
very pavements trembled. Mere words are 
inadequate to give a conception of the horror 
of it all. There would come the hungry 
whine of a shell passing low over the housetops, 
followed, an instant later, by a shattering 
crash, and the whole facade of the building 
that had been struck would topple into the 
street in a cascade of brick and stone and plaster. 
It was not until Thursday night, however, 
that the Germans brought their famous forty- 
two-centimetre guns into action. The effect 
of these monster cannon was appalling. So 
tremendous was the detonation that it sounded 
as though the German batteries were firing 
salvoes. The projectiles they were now raining 
upon the city weighed a ton apiece and had 
the destructive properties of that much nitro- 
glycerine. We could hear them as they came. 
They made a roar in the air which sounded 
at first like an approaching express-train, but 
which rapidly rose in volume until the at- 
mosphere quivered with the howl of a cy- 
clone. Then would come an explosion which 
jarred the city to its very foundation. Over 




liie clfect of German shells in Antwerp. 

"They sliced away the facades of houses, leaving their interiors 
exposed, like the interiors upon a stage." 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 201 

the shivering earth rolled great clouds of dust 
and smoke. When one of these terrible pro- 
jectiles struck a building it did not merely tear 
away the upper stories or blow a gaping 
aperture in its walls: the whole building 
crumbled, disintegrated, collapsed, as though 
flattened by a mighty hand. When they 
exploded in the open street they not only tore 
a hole in the pavement the size of a cottage 
cellar, but they sliced away the fagades of all 
the houses in the immediate vicinity, leaving 
their interiors exposed, like the interiors upon 
a stage. Compared with the "forty-twos" 
the shell and shrapnel fire of the first night's 
bombardment was insignificant and harmless. 
The thickest masonry was crumpled up like so 
much cardboard. The stoutest cellars were 
no protection if a shell struck above them. 
It seemed as though at times the whole city 
was coming down about our ears. Before the 
bombardment had been in progress a dozen 
hours there was scarcely a street in the southern 
quarter of the city — save only the district 
occupied by wealthy Germans, whose houses 
remained untouched — ^which was not ob- 
structed by heaps of fallen masonry. The main 



202 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

thoroughfares were strewn with fallen electric- 
light and trolley wires and shattered poles 
and branches lopped from trees. The side- 
walks were carpeted with broken glass. The 
air was heavy with the acrid fumes of smoke 
and powder. Abandoned dogs howled mourn- 
fully before the doors of their deserted homes. 
From a dozen quarters of the city columns of 
smoke by day and pillars of fire by night rose 
against the sky. It was hell with the lid off — 
and I am not using the term flippantly either. 
Owing to circumstances — fortunate or un- 
fortunate, as one chooses to view them — I was 
not in Antwerp during the first night's bom- 
bardment. You must understand that a war 
correspondent, no matter how many thrilling 
and interesting things he may be able to 
witness, is valueless to the paper which employs 
him unless he is able to get to the end of a 
telegraph-wire and tell the readers of that 
newspaper what is happening. In other words, 
he must not only gather the news but he must 
deliver it. Otherwise his usefulness ceases. 
When, therefore, on Wednesday morning, 
the telegraph service from Antwerp abruptly 
ended, all trains and boats stopped running, and 
the city was completely cut off from communi- 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 203 

cation with the outside world, I left in my 
car for Ghent, where the telegraph was still 
in operation, to file my despatches. So dense 
was the mass of retreating soldiery and fugitive 
civilians which blocked the approaches to the 
pontoon bridge, that it took me four hours to 
get across the Scheldt, and another four hours, 
owing to the slow driving necessitated by the 
terribly congested roads, to cover the forty 
miles to Ghent. I had sent my despatches, 
had had a hasty dinner, and was on the point 
of starting back to Antwerp, when Mr. 
Johnson, the American Consul at Ostend, 
called me up by telephone. He told me that 
the Minister of War, then at Ostend, had just 
sent him a package containing the keys of 
buildings and dwellings belonging to German 
residents of Antwerp who had been expelled 
at the beginning of the war, with the request 
that they be transmitted to the German 
commander immediately the German troops 
entered the city, as it was feared that, were 
these places found to be locked, it might lead 
to the doors being broken open and thus give 
the Germans a pretext for sacking. Mr. 
Johnson asked me if I would remain in Ghent 



204 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

until he could come through in his car with 
the keys and if I would assume the responsibil- 
ity of seeing that the keys reached the Ger- 
man commander. I explained to Mr. Johnson 
that it was imperative that I should return to 
Antwerp immediately; but when he insisted 
that, under the circumstances, it was clearly 
my duty to take the keys through to Antwerp, 
I promised to await his arrival, although by so 
doing I felt that I was imperilling the interests 
of the newspaper which was employing me. 
Owing to the congested condition of the roads 
Mr. Johnson was unable to reach Ghent until 
Thursday morning. By this time the high- 
road between Ghent and Antwerp was utterly 
impassable — one might as well have tried to 
paddle a canoe up the rapids at Niagara as to 
drive a car against the current of that river 
of terrified humanity — so, taking advantage 
of comparatively empty by-roads, I succeeded 
in reaching Doel, a fishing village on the Scheldt 
a dozen miles below Antwerp, by noon on 
Thursday. 

By means of alternate bribes and threats, 
Roos, my driver, persuaded a boatman to take 
us up to Antwerp in a small motor launch 




The bombardment of Antwerp. 

Abandoned and starving dogs howled mournfully in front of what 
had once been their homes. 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 205 

over which, as a measure of precaution, I 
raised an American flag. As long as memory 
lasts there will remain with me, sharp and 
clear, the recollection of that journey up the 
Scheldt, the surface of which was literally 
black with vessels with their loads of silent 
misery. It was well into the afternoon and 
the second day's bombardment was at its 
height when we rounded the final bend in the 
river and the lace-like tower of the cathedral 
rose before us. Shells were exploding every 
few seconds, columns of gray-green smoke 
rose skyward, the air reverberated as though 
to a continuous peal of thunder. As we ran 
alongside the deserted quays a shell burst with 
a terrific crash in a street close by, and our 
boatman, panic-stricken, suddenly reversed his 
engine and backed into the middle of the river. 
Roos drew his pistol. 

"Go ahead!" he commanded. "Run up 
to the quay so that we can land." Before the 
grim menace of the automatic the man sullenly 
obeyed. 

"Fve a wife and family at Doel," he 
muttered. "If Fm killed there'll be no one 
to look after them." 



2o6 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

"IVe a wife and family in America," I 
retorted. ** You're taking no more chances 
than I am." 

I am not in the least ashamed to admit, 
however, that as we ran alongside the Red Star 
quays — the American flag was floating above 
them, by the way — I would quite willingly 
have given everything I possessed to have been 
back on Broadway again. A great city which 
has suddenly been deserted by its popu- 
lation is inconceivably depressing. Add to 
this the fact that every few seconds a shell 
would burst somewhere behind the row of 
buildings that screened the water-front, and 
that occasionally one would clear the house- 
tops altogether and, moaning over our heads, 
would drop into the river and send up a great 
geyser, and you will understand that Antwerp 
was not exactly a cheerful place in which to 
land. There was not a soul to be seen any- 
where. Such of the inhabitants as remained 
had taken refuge in their cellars, and just at 
that time a deep cellar would have looked 
extremely good to me. On the other hand, 
as I argued with myself, there was really an 
exceedingly small chance of a shell exploding 




^ 




o 


*^ 6 


ffi 


2 B 




o 




fct' u 




c _ 












T3 <U 




?? is 




Ji o 




^a^ 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 207 

on the particular spot where I happened to 
be standing, and if it did — well, it seemed 
more dignified, somehow, to be killed in the 
open than to be crushed to death in a cellar 
like a cornered rat.- 

About ten o'clock in the evening the bom- 
bardment slackened for a time and the in- 
habitants of Antwerp's underworld began to 
creep out of their subterranean hiding-places 
and slink like ghosts along the quays in search 
of food. The great quantities of foodstuffs 
and other provisions which had been taken 
from the captured German vessels at the 
beginning of the war had been stored in hastily 
constructed warehouses upon the quays and 
it was not long before the rabble, undeterred 
by the fear of the police and willing to chance 
the shells, had broken in the doors and were 
looting to their hearts' content. As a man 
staggered past under a load of wine bottles, 
tinned goods, and cheeses, our boatman, 
who by this time had become reconciled to 
sticking by us, inquired wistfully if he might 
do a little looting too. "We've no food left 
down the river," he urged, **and I might 
just as well get some of those provisions for 



208 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

my family as to let the Germans take them." 
Upon my assenting he disappeared into the 
darkness of the warehouse with a hand truck. 
He was not the sort who did his looting by 
retail, was that boatman. By midnight Roos 
and I were shivering as though with ague, 
for the night had turned cold, we had no coats, 
and we had been without food since leaving 
Ghent that morning. "Fm going to do a lit- 
tle looting on my own account," I announced 
finally. "Fm half frozen and almost starved 
and Fm not going to stand around here 
while there's plenty to eat and drink over in 
that warehouse." I groped my way through 
the blackness to the doorway and enter- 
ing, struck a match. By its flickering light 
I saw a case filled with bottles in straw cas- 
ings. From their shape they looked to be 
bottles of champagne. I reached for one 
eagerly, but just as my fingers closed about it 
a shell burst overhead. At least the crash 
was so terrific that it seemed as though it 
had burst overhead, though I found after- 
ward that it had exploded nearly fifty yards 
away. I ran for my life, clinging, however, 
to the bottle. **At any rate, I've found 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 209 

something to drink," I said to Roos exultantly, 
when my heart had ceased its pounding. Slip- 
ping off the straw cover I struck a match to see 
the result of my maiden attempt at looting. 
I didn't particularly care whether it was wine 
or brandy. Either would have tasted good. 
It was neither. It was a bottle of pepsin 
bitters ! 

At daybreak we started at full speed down 
the river for Doel, where we had left the car, 
as it was imperative that I should get to the 
end of a telegraph-wire, file my despatches, 
and get back to the city. They told me at 
Doel that the nearest telegraph office was at 
a little place called L'Ecluse, on the Dutch 
frontier, ten miles away. We were assured 
that there was a good road all the way and that 
we could get there and back in an hour. So 
we could have in ordinary times, but these were 
extraordinary times and the Belgians, in order 
to make things as unpleasant as possible for 
the Germans, had opened the dikes and had 
begun to inundate the country. When we 
were about half-way to L'Ecluse, therefore, 
we found our way barred by a miniature river 
and no means of crossing it. It was in such 



2IO FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

circumstances that Roos was invaluable. Col- 
lecting a force of peasants, he set them to work 
chopping down trees and with these trees we 
built a bridge sufficiently strong to support 
the weight of the car. Thus we came into 
La Clinge. But when the stolid Dutchman 
in charge of the telegraph office saw my 
despatches he shrugged his shoulders dis- 
couragingly. "It is not possible to send them 
from here,'* he explained. "We have no 
instrument here but have to telephone every- 
thing to Hulst, eight miles away. As I do not 
understand English it would be impossible to 
telephone your despatches." There seemed 
nothing for it but to walk to Hulst and back 
again, for the Dutch officials refused to permit 
me to take the car, which was a military one, 
across the frontier. Just at that moment a 
young Belgian priest — Heaven bless him! — 
who had overheard the discussion, approached 
me. "If you will permit me, monsieur," 
said he, "I will be glad to take your despatches 
through to Hulst myself. I understand their 
importance. And it is well that the people in 
England and in America should learn what is 
happening here in Belgium and how bitterly 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 211 

we need their aid." Those despatches were, I 
believe, the only ones to come out of Antwerp 
during the bombardment. The fact that the 
newspaper readers in London and New York 
and San Francisco were enabled to learn 
within a few hours of what had happened in 
the great city on the Scheldt was due, not to 
any efforts of mine, but to this little Belgian 
priest. 

But when we got back to Doel the 
launch was gone. The boatman, evidently 
not relishing another taste of bombardment, 
had decamped, taking his launch with him. 
And neither offers of money nor threats nor 
pleadings could obtain me another one. For 
a time it looked as though getting back to 
Antwerp was as hopeless as getting to the 
moon. Just as I was on the point of giving 
up in despair, Roos appeared with a gold-laced 
official whom he introduced as the chief 
quarantine officer. "He is going to let you 
take the quarantine launch," said he. I don't 
know just what arguments Roos had brought 
to bear, and I was careful not to inquire, but 
ten minutes later I was sitting in lonely state 
on the after deck of a trim black yacht and we 



212 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

were streaking it up the river at twenty miles 
an hour. As I knew that the fall of the city 
was only a matter of hours, I refused to let 
Roos accompany me and take the chances of 
being made a prisoner by the Germans, but 
ordered him instead to take the car, while 
there was yet time, and make his way to 
Ostend. I never saw him again. By way of 
precaution, in case the Germans should already 
be in possession of the city, I had taken the 
two American flags from the car and hoisted 
them on the launch, one from the mainmast 
and the other at the tafFrail. It was a certain 
satisfaction to know that the only craft that 
went the wrong way of the river during the 
bombardment flew the Stars and Stripes. 
As we came within sight of the quays, the 
bombardment, which had become inter- 
mittent, suddenly broke out afresh and I was 
compelled to use both bribes and threats — the 
latter backed up by an automatic — to induce 
the crew of the launch to run in and land me 
at the quay. An hour after I landed the city 
surrendered. 

The withdrawal of the garrison from Antwerp 
began on Thursday and, everything con- 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 213 

sidered, was carried out in excellent order, the 
troops being recalled in units from the outer 
line, marched through the city and across 
the pontoon bridge which spans the Scheldt 
and thence down the road to St. Nicolas to 
join the retreating field army. What was im- 
plied in the actual withdrawal from contact 
with the enemy will be appreciated when I 
explain the conditions which existed. In 
places the lines were not two hundred yards 
apart and for the defenders no movement 
was possible during the dayhght. Many of 
the men in the firing-line had been on duty 
for nearly a hundred hours and were utterly 
worn out both mentally and physically. Such 
water and food as they had were sent to them 
at night, for any attempt to cross the open 
spaces in the daytime the Germans met with 
fierce bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire. The 
evacuation of the trenches was, therefore, a 
most difficult and dangerous operation and 
that it was carried out with so comparatively 
small loss speaks volumes for the ability of 
the officers to whom the direction of the 
movement was intrusted, as does the successful 
accomplishment of the retreat from Antwerp 



214 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

into West Flanders along a road which was 
not only crowded with refugees but was 
constantly threatened by the enemy. The 
chief danger was, of course, that the Germans 
would cross the river at Termonde in force 
and thus cut off the line of retreat toward 
the coast, forcing the whole Belgian army and 
the British contingent across the frontier of 
Holland. To the Belgian cavalry and Cara- 
bineer cyclists and to the armored cars was 
given the task of averting this catastrophe, 
and it is due to them that the Germans were 
held back for a sufficient time to enable 
practically the whole of the forces evacuating 
Antwerp to escape. That a large proportion 
of the British Naval Reserve Divisions were 
pushed across the frontier and interned was 
not due to any fault of the Belgians, but, in 
some cases at least, to their officers' miscon- 
ception of the attitude of Holland. Just as I 
was leaving Doel on my second trip up the 
river, a steamer loaded to the guards with 
British Naval Reservists swung in to the wharf, 
but, to my surprise, the men did not start to 
disembark. Upon inquiring of some one 
where they were bound for I was told that 




A billet-doux from the Germans 
which a resident of Antwerp 
picked up in his garden. 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 215 

they were going to continue down the Scheldt 
to Terneuzen. Thereupon I ordered the 
launch to run alongside and clambered aboard 
the steamer. 

"I understand," said I, addressing a group 
of officers who seemed to be as much in 
authority as any one, "that you are keeping on 
down the river to Terneuzen ? That is not 
true, is it ? " 

They looked at me as though I had walked 
into their club in Pall Mall and had spoken 
to them without an introduction. 

"It is," said one of them coldly. "What 
about it?" 

"Oh, nothing much," said I, "except that 
three miles down this river you'll be in Dutch 
territorial waters, whereupon you will all be 
arrested and held as prisoners until the end 
of the war. It's really none of my business, 
I know, but I feel that I ought to warn you." 

"How very extraordinary," remarked one 
of them, screwing a monocle into his eye. 
"We're not at war with Holland^ are we? 
So why should the bally Dutchmen want to 
trouble us ?" 

There was no use arguing with them, so I 



2i6 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

dropped down the ladder into the launch and 
gave the signal for full steam ahead. As I 
looked back I saw the steamer cast off from 
the wharf and, swinging slowly out into the 
river, point her nose down-stream toward 
Holland. 

On Friday morning, October 9, General de 
Guise, the military Governor of Antwerp, 
ordered the destruction of the pontoon bridge 
across the Scheldt, which was now the sole 
avenue of retreat from the city. The mines 
which were exploded beneath it did more 
damage to the buildings along the water-front 
than to the bridge, however, only the middle 
spans of which were destroyed. When the 
last of the retreating Belgians came pouring 
down to the water-front a few hours later to 
find their only avenue of escape gone, for a 
time scenes of the wildest confusion ensued, 
the men frantically crowding aboard such 
vessels as remained at the wharfs or opening 
fire on those which were already in mid- 
stream and refused to return in answer to their 
summons. I wish to emphasize the fact, how- 
ever, that these were but isolated incidents; 
that these men were exhausted in mind and 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 217 

body from many days of fighting against hope- 
less odds; and that, as a whole, the Belgian 
troops bore themselves, in this desperate and 
trying situation, with a courage and coolness 
deserving of the highest admiration. I have 
heard it said in England that the British Naval 
Division was sent to Antwerp "to stiffen the 
Belgians." That may have been the intention, 
but the Belgians needed no stiffening. They 
did everything that any other troops could 
have done under the same circumstances — and 
more. Nor did the men of the Naval 
Division, as has been frequently asserted in 
England, cover the Belgian retreat. The last 
troops to leave the trenches were Belgians, 
the last shots were fired by Belgians, and the 
Belgians were the last to cross the river. 

At noon on Friday, General de Guise and his 
staff having taken refuge in Fort St. PhiHppe, 
a few miles below Antwerp on the Scheldt, 
the officer in command of the last line of defence 
sent word to the burgomaster that his troops 
could hold out but a short time longer and 
suggested that the time had arrived for him to 
go out to the German lines under a flag of truce 



2i8 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

and secure the best terms possible for the city. 
As the burgomaster, M. de Vos, accompanied 
by Deputy Louis Franck, Communal Coun- 
cillor Ryckmans, and the Spanish Consul (it 
was expected that the American Consul- 
General would be one of the parlementairesy 
but it was learned that he had left the day 
before for Ghent) went out of the city by one 
gate, half a dozen motor-cars filled with 
German soldiers entered through the Porte 
de Malines, sped down the broad, tree-shaded 
boulevards which lead to the centre of the 
city, and drew up before the Hotel de Ville. 
In answer to the summons of a j^oung ofl&cer 
in a voluminous gray cloak the door was 
cautiously opened by a servant in the blue- 
and-silver livery of the municipality. 

"I have a message to deliver to the members 
of the Communal Council," said the officer 
poHtely. 

"The councillors are at dinner and cannot 
be disturbed," was the firm reply. "But if 
monsieur desires he can sit down and wait 
for them." So the young officer patiently 
seated himself on a wooden bench while his 
men ranged themselves along one side of the 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 219 

hall. After a delay of perhaps twenty minutes 
the door of the dining-room opened and a 
councillor appeared, wiping his mustache. 

"I understand that you have a message for 
the Council. Well, what is it?" he demanded 
pompously. 

The young officer clicked his heels together 
and bowed from the waist. 

"The message I am instructed to give you, 
sir," he said politely, "is that Antwerp is now 
a German city. You are requested by the 
general commanding his Imperial Majesty's 
forces so to inform your townspeople and to 
assure them that they will not be molested so 
long as they display no hostility towards our 
troops." 

While this dramatic little scene was being 
enacted in the historic setting of the Hotel 
de Ville, the burgomaster, unaware that the 
enemy was already within the city gates, was 
conferring with the German commander, 
who informed him that if the outlying forts 
were immediately surrendered no money in- 
demnity would be demanded from the city, 
though all merchandise found in its ware- 
houses would be confiscated. 



220 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

The first troops to enter were a few score 
cyclists, who advanced cautiously from street 
to street and from square to square until they 
formed a network of scouts extending over 
the entire city. After them, at the quickstep, 
came a brigade of infantry and hard on the 
heels of the infantry clattered half a dozen 
batteries of horse-artillery. These passed 
through the city to the water-front at a spank- 
ing trot, unhmbered on the quays, and opened 
fire with shrapnel on the retreating Belgians, 
who had already reached the opposite side of 
the river. Meanwhile a company of infantry 
started at the double across the pontoon 
bridge, evidently unaware that its middle spans 
had been destroyed. Without an instant's 
hesitation two soldiers threw off their knap- 
sacks, plunged into the river, swam across the 
gap, clambered up onto the other portion of 
the bridge and, in spite of a heavy fire from 
the fort at the Tete de Flandre, dashed forward 
to reconnoitre. That is the sort of deed that 
wins the Iron Cross. Within Httle more than 
an hour after reaching the water-front the 
Germans had brought up their engineers and 
pontoon wagons, the bridge had been repaired. 




The retreat from Antwerp. The Belgian army passing 
through Lokoren. 




The rear-guard of the retreating Antwerp garrison. 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 221 

the fire from Fort St. Anne had been silenced, 
and their troops were pouring across the river 
in a steady stream in pursuit of the Belgians. 
The grumble of field-guns, which continued 
throughout the night, told us that they had 
overtaken the Belgian rear-guard. 

Though the bombardment ended early on 
Friday afternoon, Friday night was by no 
means lacking in horrors, for early in the 
evening fires, which owed their origin to shells, 
broke out in a dozen parts of the city. The 
most serious one by far was in the narrow, 
winding thoroughfare known as the Marche 
aux Souliers, which runs from the Place Verte 
to the Place de Meir. By eight o'clock the 
entire western side of this street was a sheet 
of flame. The only spectators were groups of 
German soldiers, who watched the threatened 
destruction of the city with complete indiffer- 
ence, and several companies of firemen who 
had turned out, I suppose, from force of 
training, but who stood helplessly beside their 
empty hose lines, for there was no water. I 
firmly believe that the saving of a large part 
of Antwerp, including the cathedral, was due 
to an American resident, Mr. Charles WhithofF, 



222 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

who, recognizing the extreme peril in which 
the city stood, hurried to the Hotel de Ville 
and suggested to the German military au- 
thorities that they should prevent the spread 
of flames by dynamiting the adjacent buildings. 
Acting promptly on this suggestion, a telephone 
message was sent to Brussels, and four hours 
later several automobiles loaded with hand- 
grenades came tearing into Antwerp, A squad 
of soldiers was placed under Mr. WhithofPs 
orders and, following his directions, they blew 
up a cordon of buildings and effectually isolated 
the flames. I shall not soon forget the figure 
of this young American, in bedroom slippers 
and smoking-jacket, coolly instructing German 
soldiers in the most approved methods of fire 
fighting. 

Nearly a week before the surrender of the 
city, the municipal water-works, near Lierre, 
had been destroyed by shells from the German 
siege-guns, so that when the Germans entered 
the city the sanitary conditions had become 
intolerable and an epidemic was impending. 
So scarce did water become during the last 
few days of the siege that when, on the evening 
of the surrender, I succeeded in obtaining 




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THE FALL OF ANTWERP 223 

a bottle of Apollinaris I debated with myself 
whether I should use it for washing or drinking. 
I finally compromised by drinking part of it 
and washing in the rest. The Germans were 
by no means blind to the peril of an epidemic, 
and, before they had been three hours in 
occupation of the city their medical corps was 
at work cleaning and disinfecting. Every 
contingency, in fact, seemed to have been 
anticipated and provided for. Every phase 
of the occupation was characterized by the 
German passion for method and order. The 
machinery of the municipal health department 
was promptly set in motion. The police were 
ordered to take up their duties as though no 
change in government had occurred. The 
train service to Brussels, Holland, and Ger- 
many was restored. Stamps surcharged " Fur 
Belgien,'* were put on sale at the post-office. 
The electric-lighting system was repaired and 
on Saturday night, for the first time since the 
Zeppelin's memorable visit the latter part of 
August, Antwerp was again ablaze with light. 
When, immediately after the occupation, 
I hurried to the American Consulate with the 
package of keys which I had brought from 



224 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

Ghent, I was somewhat surprised, to put it 
mildly, to find the Consulate closed and to 
learn from the concierge, who, with his wife, 
had remained in the building throughout the 
bombardment, that Consul-General Diederich 
and his entire staff had left the city on Thursday 
cnorning. I was particularly surprised because 
I knew that, upon the departure of the British 
Consul-General, Sir Cecil Hertslet, some days 
before, the enormous British interests in 
Antwerp had been confided to American 
protection. The concierge, who knew me and 
seemed decidedly relieved to see me, made 
no objection to opening the Consulate and 
letting me in. While deliberating as to the 
best method of transmitting the keys which 
had been intrusted to me to the German 
military Governor without informing him of 
the embarrassing fact that the American and 
British interests in the city were without 
official representation, those Americans and 
British who had remained in the city during 
the bombardment began to drop in. Some of 
them were frightened and all of them were 
plainly worried, the women in particular, 
among whom were several British Red Cross 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 225: 

nurses, seeming fearful that the soldiers might 
get out of hand. As there was no one else 
to look after these people, and as I had formerly 
been in the consular service myself, and as 
they said quite frankly that they would feel 
relieved if I took charge of things, I decided 
to "sit on the Hd,'' as it were, until the Consul- 
General's return. In assuming charge of 
British and American affairs in Antwerp, at 
the request and with the approval of what re- 
mained of the Anglo-American colony in that 
city, I am quite aware that I acted in a manner 
calculated to scandalize those gentlemen who 
have been steeped in the ethics of diplomacy. 
As one youth attached to the American 
Embassy in London remarked, it was "the 
damnedest piece of impertinence" of which 
he had ever heard. But he is quite a young 
gentleman, and has doubtless had more ex- 
perience in ballrooms than in bombarded cities, 
I immediately wrote a brief note to the 
German commander transmitting the keys 
and informing him that, in the absence of the 
American Consul-General I had assumed 
charge of American and British interests in 
Antwerp, and expected the fullest protection 



226 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

for them, to which I received a prompt and 
courteous reply assuring me that foreigners 
would not be molested in any way. In the 
absence of the consular staff, Thompson 
volunteered to act as messenger and deliver 
my message to the German commander. 
While on his way to the Hotel de Ville, which 
was being used as staff headquarters, a German 
infantry regiment passed him in a narrow street. 
Because he failed to remove his hat to the 
colors a German officer struck him twice 
with the flat of his sword, only desisting when 
Thompson pulled a silk American flag from his 
pocket. Upon learning of this occurrence I 
vigorously protested to the military authorities, 
who offered profuse apologies for the incident 
and assured me that the officer would be 
punished if Thompson could identify him. 
Consul-General Diederich returned to Ant- 
werp on Monday and I left the same day for 
the nearest telegraph station in Holland. 

The whole proceeding was irregular and 
unauthorized, of course, but for that matter 
so was the German invasion of Belgium. In 
any event, it seemed the thing to do and I 
did it, and, under the same circumstances, I 
should do precisely the same thing over again. 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 227 

Though a very large force of German troops 
passed through Antwerp during Friday night 
in pursuit of the retreating Belgians, the 
triumphal entry of the victors did not be- 
gin until Saturday afternoon, when sixty 
thousand men passed in review before the 
miHtary Governor, Admiral von Schroeder, 
and General von Beseler, who, surrounded by 
a glittering staff, sat their horses in front of 
the royal palace. So far as onlookers were 
concerned, the Germans might as well have 
marched through the streets of ruined Babylon. 
Thompson and I, standing in the windows of 
the American Consulate, were the only 
spectators in the entire length of the mile- 
long Place de Meir — ^which is the Broadway 
of Antwerp — of the great military pageant. 
The streets were absolutely deserted; every 
building was dark, every window shuttered; 
in a thoroughfare which had blossomed with 
bunting a few days before, not a flag was to be 
seen. I think that even the Germans were a 
little awed by the deathly silence that greeted 
them. As Thompson dryly remarked, "It 
reminds me of a circus that's come to town 
the day before it's expected." 



228 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

For five hours that mighty host poured 
through the canyons of brick and stone: 

^^ Above the bugles^ din, 
Sweating beneath their haversacks. 
With rifles bristling on their backs. 

The dusty men trooped in" 

Company after company, regiment after 
regiment, brigade after brigade swept by until 
our eyes grew weary with watching the ranks 
of gray under the slanting Hnes of steel. As 
they marched they sang, the high buildings 
along the Place de Meir and the Avenue de 
Keyset echoing to their voices thundering out 
'^ Die Wacht am Rhein/* *^ Deutschland, 
Deutschland uher Allies'' and "Ein Feste Burg 
1st Unser Gott.'* Though the singing was 
mechanical, like the faces of the men who sang, 
the mighty volume of sound, punctuated at 
regular intervals by the shrill music of the fifes 
and the rattle of the drums, and accompanied 
always by the tramp, tramp, tramp of iron-shod 
boots, was one of the most impressive things 
that I have ever heard. Each regiment was 
headed by its field music and colors, and when 
darkness fell and the street lights were turned 
on, the shriek of the fifes and the clamor of 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 229 

the drums and the rhythmic tramp of march- 
ing feet reminded me of a torchHght poHtical 
parade at home. 

At the head of the column rode a squadron 
of gendarmes — the policemen of the army — 
gorgeous in uniforms of bottle-green and silver 
and mounted on sleek and shining horses. 
After them came the infantry: solid columns 
of gray-clad figures with the silhouettes of 
the mounted officers rising at intervals above 
the forest of spike-crowned helmets. After the 
infantry came the field artillery, the big guns 
rattling and rumbling over the cobblestones, 
the cannoneers sitting with folded arms and 
heels drawn in, and wooden faces, like servants 
on the box of a carriage. These were the same 
guns that had been in almost constant action 
for the preceding fortnight and that for forty 
hours had poured death and destruction into 
the city, yet both men and horses were in the 
very pink of condition, as keen as razors, and 
as hard as nails; the blankets, the buckets, 
the knapsacks, the intrenching tools were all 
strapped in their appointed places, and the 
brown leather harness was polished like a lady's 
tan shoes. After the field-batteries came the 



230 FIGHTING IN FLANDERS 

horse-artillery and after the horse-artillery the 
pompoms — each drawn by a pair of sturdy 
draught-horses driven with web reins by a 
soldier sitting on the limber — and after the 
pompoms an interminable line of machine 
guns, until one wondered where Krupp's found 
the time and the steel to make them all. Then, 
heralded by a blare of trumpets and a crash 
of kettle-drums, came the cavalry; Cuirassiers 
with their steel helmets and breastplates 
covered with gray linen, Hussars in befrogged 
gray jackets and fur busbies, also linen-covered, 
and finally the Uhlans, riding amid a forest of 
lances under a cloud of fluttering pennons. But 
this was not all, nor nearly all, for after the 
Uhlans came the sailors of the Naval Division, 
brown-faced, bewhiskered fellows with their 
round, flat caps tilted rakishly and the roll of the 
sea in their gait; then the Bavarians in dark 
blue, the Saxons in light blue, and the Austrians 
— the same who had handled the big guns so 
eff*ectively — in uniforms of a beautiful silver 
gray. Accompanying one of the Bavarian 
regiments was a victoria drawn by a fat white 
horse, with two soldiers on the box. Horse 
and carriage were decorated with flowers as 




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THE FALL OF ANTWERP 231 

though for a floral parade at Nice; even the 
soldiers had flowers pinned to their caps and 
nosegays stuck in their tunics. The carriage 
was evidently a sort of triumphal chariot 
dedicated to the celebration of the victory, 
for it was loaded with hampers of champagne 
and violins ! 

The army which captured Antwerp was, 
first, last and all the time, a fighting army. 
There was not a Landsturm or a Landwehr 
regiment in it. The men were as pink- 
ch^^eked as athletes; they marched with the 
buoyancy of men in perfect health. And yet 
the human element was lacking; there was 
none of the pomp and panoply commonly 
associated with war; these men in gray were 
merely wheels and cogs and bolts and screws 
in a great machine — the word which has been 
used so often of the German army, yet must 
be repeated, because there is no other — ^whose 
only purpose is death. As that great fighting 
machine swung past, remorseless as a trip- 
hammer, efficient as a steam roller, I could 
not but marvel how the gallant, chivalrous, and 
heroic but ill-prepared little army of Belgium 
had held it back so long. 



BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL 

THE END OF 
THE TRAIL 

The author's principal motive in this book is to re- 
veal the existence of the pioneer in " the unexplored 
and unexploited portions of the Last West," to show 
that just off the usual routes of tourists there are 
still those picturesque conditions that give " the 
West" its glamour, but he exposes every feature 
of the regions covered — New Mexico, Arizona, Cal- 
ifornia, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia — 
and describes their present conditions and their 
prospects, national and commercial, rural and ur- 
ban, social and political. 





CONTENTS 


I. 


Conquerors of Sun and Sand. 


II. 


The Skylanders. 


III. 


Chopping a Path to To-morrow. 


IV. 


The Land of Dreams-Come-True. 


V. 


Where Gold Grows on Trees. 


VI. 


The Coast of Fairyland. 


VII. 


The Valley of Heart's Content. 


VIII. 


The Modern Argonauts. 


IX. 


The Inland Empire. 


X. 


" Where Rolls the Oregon." 


XI. 


A Frontier Arcady. 


XII. 


Breaking the Wilderness. 


XIII. 


Clinching the Rivets of Empire. 


XIV. 


Back of Beyond. 


XV. 


The Map that is Half Unrolled. 


Profusely illustrated with Remarkable Photographs. 




$3.00 net ; postage extra. 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

FIFTH AVENUE AT 48th STREET, NEW YORK 



BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL 

THE LAST 
FRONTIER 

"Mr. Powell's pages are full of sheer fascination 
as he tells of lands and peoples all the way from 
Morocco and Tripoli, through the Sahara and Sudan, 
the Congo and Kameruns, to Rhodesia and insular 
Madagascar." — New York Times. 

*' The man who knows the value and zest of a broad 
outlook on our contracting world in our cosmopolitan 
age will delight in this book." — Literary Digest, 
New and Cheaper Edition. %i. 50 net 

GENTLEMEN 
ROVERS 

" Mr. Powell writes with power and spirit of the 
men who put the Barbary pirates out of business, of 
those who went ahead of the pioneers to California, 
of what a pirate could do to help our beleaguered 
army at New Orleans, and his book is a good ad- 
dition to the history of how strong men rise when 
occasion presents itself." — Chicago Tribune. 

"A bully book for boys, full of thrilling exploits, 
each of them historically true. . . . American boy- 
dom will be grateful for what Mr. Powell has done." 

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 

Illustrated. $1.50 net 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

FIFTH AVENUE AT 48th STREET, NEW YORK 

















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